Way down here in Gravataí, Brazil, we have a Word of Life camp. It is an amazing, beautiful camp.
It is also very expensive.
Back in October, we had been doing some research on their website about prices, and low and behold, for a limited time, if you had 6 kids sign up it was only R$30 a kid!!
Not quite.
The registration fee was only R$30, the rest of the fee was R$200.
That amount is not really doable for the families of our church.
Unfortunately, we didn’t figure this out until we had a list of kids who were planning on going to camp…for the first time ever.
Grrrr.
We couldn’t just leave them with nothing, so in a month’s time, we planned a 2 day retreat out at Geferson’s dad’s farm!
We had about 12 kids from our church(their friends included) and 8 from a sister church, Comunidade Cristã Sitio Gaúcho, to join us for the 2 days. We started out at a public pool that had a couple of water slides, then moved on to the farm.
There were some challenges throughout day #1. These 2 groups of kids wanted to stay 2 separate groups of kids, as in, they didn’t really want anything to do with each other. We even had a couple of fights during a soccer game.
At lunch time we had them pair up with someone from the other church and told them they had till that night to get to know their partner for a “how well do you know your partner” game.
The looks on their faces were priceless.
“What? You mean I have to act like I want to know something about this person? Are you serious?”
But, we started to see them talking a little more to each other throughout the rest of the day.
That night we played the game. They were asked a question about their partner, if they didn’t know the answer, they got a pie thrown in their face.
There were a lot of pies thrown. (And yes, I was forced to throw a pie in Lucas’s face. Forced.)
I left that night before the message and campfire time to take the boys home to sleep. That’s right, I sacrificed myself so the boys could sleep in their own beds instead of with all the spiders and mosquitos and all the other creepy crawly things out there.
I did it for the boys.
I’ll confess my sin of lying later.
Anyway, when I came back the next morning, something had changed.
The feeling in the air was different.
The looks on their faces were different.
They were smiling.
At each other.
They were interacting.
With each other.
We no longer had 2 groups from 2 different churches with a long and complicated history, but one united group of kids who understood and loved each other from all sorts of different walks of life and backgrounds.
It was a night and day difference.
The 2 boys who had fought the day before in a soccer game were totally hanging out together.
Groups of girls from both churches were sitting around sharing about their lives.
They were having fun…together.
They were sharing about what God was doing in their lives…with each other.
By the end of the retreat they were collecting emails and cell phone numbers from each other. They even started planning a grill out together!
The next day, all 8 kids from the Sitio Gaúcho church took a bus over to the Rincão to celebrate one of the Rincão teen’s birthday.
Amazing.
God used this retreat in many ways in these teens lives.
But, the most obvious one to me, was how He showed them that they could help each other. They realized that they understand each other, and that the church baggage from the past is not theirs to carry.
How many of us need to learn from them?
