Our annual Church camp out is this weekend!  We’re hoping to go up a day or so early (I may have my husband take me up and leave me there alone to do some writing)  I LOVE CAMPING.  When I was a little girl, my parents would take us good, old-fashioned tent camping up in the mountains in Southern California.  My little sister and I would sleep together in an army surplus hammock tent! 

My spirits would start to soar as we climbed above the smog line in Riverside.  The air was much worse then than now.  So bad that we had smog alert days rather frequently and I can recall not being able to catch my breath after playing.  So when we broke through into the crystal-clear pine-scented mountain air something in my child’s heart would begin to turn handsprings!

There’s also something about being "unplugged" in this modern age.  I won’t have the internet, phone, cell phone or television (sorry Daisies I won’t even be able to be on the message board or write my blog!) but I will take pictures.  I’ll have to entertain myself the old-fashioned way, which will consist of getting beaten by every team in the camp at horse shoes, spending time with my Pastor’s wife catching up on our lives, sitting around in my zero-gravity recliner chair soaked in mosquito spray and taking a power nap or two!

Do you have plans to get away somewhere to unwind?  You really don’t have to spend a great deal of money to do so.  The amount of restfulness of a vacation sometimes can be in direct proportion to how much was or wasn’t spent on it.  For me, it seems the more expensive the vacation plans the more I need a vacation from my vacation when I get home. 

My friend Karla Dornacher (www.karladornacher.com) and her husband just came to visit us last month and their summer vacation was a two week road trip with minimal planning and a lot of spontaneity!  They tent camped a little, slept in motels along the way (when it rained) and soaked in the wonder of God’s creation everywhere they went.  They also just enjoyed each other’s company and had as much fun just being together, as being together in some really beautiful places.

I want to encourage you to spend some time really, really relaxing this summer.  If you haven’t camped in a while, maybe that’s an option for you.  If you have children, camping can be a lot of work for the mom (it’s not quite as carefree as you remember it being when you were the child!) but it creates priceless memories for your children.  Exposing them to the wonders of God’s creation, whether in the mountains,at the beach, by a river, at a lake or in the desert is a really life-impacting experience for them.  So Mom, if you hate dirt and bugs, try to put yourself in your children’s shoes and remember how wonderful the world was to explore when you were little!  A little sacrifice on your part can make their eyes truly shine. 

Maybe you can borrow a friend’s trailer or motorhome, or perhaps rent one for a week.  We love camping, but I will confess that we do it in our fifth wheel, so it’s much more like being home in a new place.  Our trailer is an older one that we bought three years ago, and even though we use it very little it keeps aging (and time is making it fall apart) and we keep forgetting to take it down the mountain for repairs… the water tank doesn’t hold water so there’s no hot showers, the refrigerator broke at the end of last summer so we’ll be using ice chests… but we’ll be together, in God’s wonderful world so it will be PERFECT!!!

Audrey Jeanne Roberts