Where Summer Becomes Strength
Camp isn’t an escape from reality. Camp equips kids to live it.
Labor Day’s grill has gone cold and been rolled back into the garage. School is in session; life is backpacks, bells, and books again. Summer is long gone, but the echoes of camp still carry forward into autumn, right alongside the orange leaves and crisp mornings.
At my house, those echoes look like a red shoelace turned necklace, weathered and tattered by months of adventures and never taken off. Over three months ago, when we dropped our son off for summer camp on opening day, every kid got a necklace paired with how they performed on their swim test. You can still spot them swarming around Raleigh like badges of honor. They aren’t fancy. They aren’t branded. They don’t even have a logo. It’s simply a shoelace, clasped together with a now rusty piece of metal, transformed into a makeshift necklace.
This red cord has stained countless shirts, survived countless debates about whether it’s appropriate for church, and seen every waking and sleeping moment since we pulled away from camp. It wasn’t a prize. It wasn’t even rare, every camper got one. In fact, red meant “last place,” not first. And still, none of that mattered.
What mattered was where it came from: camp... his camp... the camp... where he tasted the joy of the gospel in an un-air-conditioned box that trapped the smell of wet towels and ten thousand bare feet. It came from the place where he had “the best week of his life.”
Trinkets, Tokens, and Timepieces
What is it about these little trinkets... shoelace necklaces, beaded bracelets, frayed T-shirts, that kids guard like relics from the lost ark? They’re not worth much on eBay. But to a camper, they’re treasures from a quest; artifacts in a personal museum of strings, stickers, and beads from five days they lived five months ago.
Here’s the secret: the meaning isn’t in the object. The meaning lives in the moment the object remembers, the moment they won it, wore it, and looked around to see a hundred friends wearing the same thing. These mementos are tactile timepieces from the tangible milestones and memories manufactured at camp.
Not a Detour, A New Direction
Camp isn't an escape from “real life.” Camp is where kids practice real-life friendship, courage, service, and faith in concentrated form. It’s where they discover that joy grows in sacrifice, that leadership looks like showing up early and staying late, and that the gospel doesn’t just inspire you; it sends you.
So when a child clings to a red shoelace or a threadbare shirt for months, they’re not grasping at nostalgia. They’re carrying a reminder. A reminder that God’s glory really did feel close for a few days and that they can shine a little brighter back home because of it.
The Red Cord and the Road Ahead
The red cord at our house won’t last forever. The metal will rust through, the knot will finally loosen, and the cord will eventually tatter through. But the life it points to... that strong, steady, joy-filled life can last. Because camp didn’t whisk our kid away from reality. Camp equipped them to walk through it, eyes up and hearts awake.
And that’s the magic of camp: not spectacle, but substance. Not retreat as escape, but retreat as preparation. A magical space where kids learn who they are, Whose they are, and how to carry the light back into the world.