I had a great weekend at Alpine camp both with some of the kids I met and the rest of the band, who were a lot of fun on top of being great musicians. The experience also was a good chance for some personal reflection, and I think I’ll touch on some of those topics in some upcoming posts.

We arrived Friday night and setup, ate dinner, and tried to rehearse a little bit before we went on. It was a little frustrating for me because we didn’t sound as good as I wanted with so little rehearsal and after it became clear a couple of songs needed to be removed :), but we made it through. The highlight of the night was a guy named Tim who came and shared his testimony through words and song of how he was abandoned by his parents, eventually fell into a life of drug dealing that landed him in prison, and wound up following Jesus. It was really cool to see the kids connect with Tim. The second night after zip lines and other camp shenanigans we had more worship and a nooma video titled luggage that spoke about dealing with the hurt in our lives. We ended that night just worshiping with the acoustic guitar for longer than I could think up songs to play because they didn’t want to stop.

It was also lot of fun to see how the responses of the kids changed so much over the short weekend. Here’s some of the feedback we received:

One camper wrote: I loved the video especially the part of forgiving people and I loved the music especially “nuttin but the blood of Gesus”

Another wrote: I liked the music it made me feel closer to God and even made me cry, I loved the weekend it was amazing and everyone was cool

Another wrote: I liked the video and the speaker and learned that I am not the only one that needs to learn about forgiveness before this weekend I thought I was the only one who have had bad things happen to me. Camping at Alpine was or is the best thing I have ever done.

Another wrote: I liked the speaker he told about his past and that is very hard to do, the video told the truth and everyone needs to see it. On a scale of 1-10 it was a 10 the best camp I have ever gone to.

It was really a blessing to hear how the kids were touched, and I made some new friends.