The countdown begins.

In exactly 24 hours I will be boarding the plane to Bosnia!

Okay, technically I'll be boarding a plane headed for Washington, D.C., and then from there another one to Vienna, and then another to Sarajevo. But still, it's an exciting thought.

I am sitting in my grandparents' house in Michigan surrounded by piles of laundry and miscellaneous other things from camp. I hate packing. Seriously, I have a deep personal abhorrence for picking clothes ahead of time, folding them neatly, and arranging them in a big suitcase. Camp was way more my style: I'd get dressed in the dark and didn't look in a mirror for days on end. And at the end of each day, I'd shower and be clean for a few hours, just long enough to fall asleep, and then wake up the next morning and get to run around again. It was wonderful.

Speaking of camp being wonderful... it really was. The first few days of orientation were hard; I was on the verge of tears more than once, feeling really out-of-the-loop and overwhelmed and lonely. But God is faithful. Always. Eventually I began to understand what it meant to really be at camp for the kids instead of for myself, something I thought I had grasped before but needed to relearn. I began to feel closer to the other counselors, which was great... and then the kids arrived, and everything got even better! I loved my girls! My co-counselor and I had eleven 10-year-olds in our cabin, which is like having eleven adoring younger sisters. (Sorry Kendra.) I learned a lot from them, and was amazed by the depth of questions they would ask and their willingness to be vulnerable. One day a question showed up in our anonymous question jar about why God would create people who he knew wouldn't follow him. Hmm. Yeah. It's tricky to talk predestination and original sin with a 10-year-old.

There were so many beautifully sweet moments that I can't even hope to share them all. I'll end this post with a prayer request: that in Bosnia, I wouldn't forget camp. And that when I eventually go back to camp, I wouldn't forget Bosnia. And when I say camp and Bosnia, I simply mean places where God is working--in very different ways, but definitely and evidently working.

For more information, here are links to camp and the program in Bosnia. Woohoo!