Summer Camp Expedition with the TNPC Youth Group

By Heather Zeiger

Sam and Brett Harris wrote a book for teens called Do Hard Things.  It admonishes teens not to give in to the cultural message that adolescence is a last-ditch effort at doing absolutely nothing “grown up” (read: responsible) but to have fun, consume, and live off of your parents’ dime.  Most marketing ads are geared towards 12-16 year-olds for a reason.

Do Hard Things challenges the Christian teenager to look at God’s word and to pursue excellence.  On each day at camp, David, Wayne, Kathy, Crystal, and I led the youth through some of the hard things mentioned in Sam and Brett’s book.  Additionally, there were lectures and discussion on:

• That First Scary Step: How to do hard things that take you outside your comfort zone
• Raising the Bar: How to do hard things that go beyond what’s expected or required
• The Power of Collaboration: How to do hard things that are too big for you to do alone
• Small Hard Things: How to do hard things that don’t pay off immediately
• Taking a Stand: How to do hard things that go against the crowd

But lectures are lectures, and this was a camp, so the youth also DID some hard things.  I am pleased to report that every one of them bravely embarked on one of the longest zip lines in the U.S. Some went skeet shooting and thereby used a shotgun for the first time.  Everyone ran through the dark camp looking for clues during an exercise called “Mission Impossible.”  Most of them let their friends send them flying in the air – and into cold spring water – by bouncing them off an amphibious tube dubbed “the blob.”  This tube is designed so that if one person jumps on it, another person is generally forced off.  Finally, note that several of our guys did one of the hardest things of all: learning to country-western dance during our Barn Dance on Sunday night!

Other less-hard-but-equally fun activities included horseback riding, volleyball, paintball, making friendship bracelets, s’mores, and playing some pretty intense games of Risk.

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