Mackenzie Standing

I first wrote blog posts about the sense of "home" in November and December of 2012. Nearly four years later, I still haven't figured it out. A little less than two weeks ago, I took a right turn off highway 201 onto Moose River Outpost’s three-mile long dirt driveway, and I came home. It was 12:30am and so dark that the high beams from the fifteen passenger van I was driving barely cut through the blackness of the forest. In the first row of passenger seats, one of my dearest friends, Joanie, sat, excitedly talking with me about our hopes for the summer and how good it was to be back at camp. She had picked me up at the Boston Logan airport at 8am, and we had spoken of little else in the hours since. My co-leader for the summer, Sam, had landed at the airport at 2pm and dozed at that moment in the passenger seat of the van. Though he had insisted he could co-pilot just fine, he had only returned from his study abroad trip to Scotland four days before and was deli...

When I was a junior in undergrad, I took an information technology course and subsequently went through a phase where I was obsessed with the British television program The IT Crowd . The show, which follows two traditional IT professionals and their accidental, completely-technologically-incompetent supervisor, is most known for the bored way all three employees would answer the phone: "Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Ever since I was twelve years old, my chance to turn my soul "off and on again", my opportunity to hit my internal "reset button", so to speak, has happened at summer camp. Whether in Canada or the States; whether I was a camper, counselor, worship leader, retreat attendee, chapel speaker, office manager, or had some other hat on; whether I was thriving in my faith or crippled with overwhelming doubt, camp has always been a place where God could slow down my anxious mind and capture my heart again. Over the year...