If you've ever picked a teenager up from camp, you know the drill. You ask how it was. You get "good." You ask what they did. You get "stuff." Then somewhere around week three they mention something offhand at dinner and you realize the week actually landed.
FUGE is one of those weeks.
On the surface it looks like exactly what you'd hope student camp looks like. Dance-offs. Skits. Somebody in an inflatable chicken suit. Night games with face paint and flags and a lot of yelling. A silent disco where a few hundred teenagers dance to music you can't hear. Our students had a blast, and that's not a throwaway detail. Fun is what makes a kid stay in the room long enough to hear something true.
But that's only half the week.
The other half was worship, and by every account it was the part that stuck. One of our students said it plainly: her top moment was worship with the Highlands group, because it was an intimate moment where you could really feel God there, with people you already know and love. That's a hard thing for a teenager to say out loud. It's a harder thing to manufacture. It just happens sometimes when a room full of students stops performing.
And then there was the part nobody signs up for.
Our students spent time serving in the local community, sorting cans in a food pantry, packing boxes for families, working on projects that had nothing to do with them. One afternoon they teamed up with another church and went door to door in a neighborhood, inviting people to come. That same student named it as her second favorite moment of the week, and her reason is the whole point: it meant stepping out of your comfort zone just to do something good for other people.
That's the sentence we'd frame if we could. A teenager, unprompted, describing the actual shape of following Jesus.
So to every parent who packed a bag, every leader who gave up a week of their life to ride a bus and sleep badly, and every person who gave so a student could go who couldn't otherwise afford it: this is what you paid for.
A few questions worth sitting with
- What's the last thing you did that scared you a little and turned out to be worth it?
- Who were you around the last time your faith felt real instead of routine, and how do you get more of that?
- Is there a door in your life you've been talking yourself out of knocking on?