Family Camp and Families
RobAnne and I spent last weekend speaking at Fir Point’s family camp. It was a great time – over 100 people were there, and we were able to minister to them and hear their stories, to pray with some people and talk with some people and enjoy being around young families. Some of our missionaries and their families were there. It was just great.
There is a strong need for us to provide places where families can be what they already know they should be – a connected community of relatives who follow Christ. Our daughter, Barrett, is working at camp this summer. She’s experiencing a different kind of community. Our son, R.W., is in graduate school in Chicago. But when we get together, there’s a bond.
We left the family camp, and we experienced a whole different kind of family. We spent the night with Dan and Star Robinson. Dan and Star live in a community that has a history of being countercultural, particularly in the 1960s when the hippie movement was really centered in the valley where they minister. Vestiges of that era are all through the valley. We saw abandoned buses and trailers and places where people used to come and just be during the summer, experiencing an alternative, countercultural lifestyle.
In the middle of that culture are nine people in the Robinson family – all different ages, a huge dining room table, and just a great spirit of love for one another. We arrived on Sunday morning, shortly after they came from their church’s family camp, which was just a lot of work. We sat around, eating watermelon and popcorn, and I just watched this family and thought, This is a root. This is one of the areas that we as mission need to protect.
Recently, I got an email from a person in our mission who was discouraged because his parents were spending all their time in ministry and very little time on their family. Therefore, this person feels like he never had a family, like he never experienced some of the things that I often talk about in this blog. It is my prayer that we will not let our ministries get in the way of being a family – whether it’s family camp, or a model like the Robinson family, or Ridge and RobAnne making sure that Barrett and R.W. stay in contact with their parents so they have a sense of community, as well. I hope that we are good family people.
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