24

LIFE TOGETHER

My sister Sarah called to tell me her grade school sons would be going to Honey Rock Camp the next summer—the Bible camp I’d attended every summer from age nine through high school, where I had met Caroline, and where I’d worked as a wilderness trip leader in college.

Josh and I were sitting up late after the kids were in bed, debriefing the day in our living room. It was early June and everything felt sticky. Even my hair felt damp from the humidity. Josh sat on the couch in his pajama pants, a laptop open.

“I just keep thinking about camp,” I said. “I wonder how they will like it.”

“You’re wondering how our kids would like it,” corrected Josh. We were sitting together on our worn-out couches, and I turned to face him.

“Okay, maybe I am,” I said. Josh closed his eyes and sighed.

“You know I never went to camp like you did,” he said. I knew. And I knew what he was going to say. I stood up quickly and walked into the kitchen to grab a glass from the cupboard.

“Yeah and you would have loved it,” I said, turning on the water faucet and filling up the glass. The sound temporarily shushed any outside noise, giving me a moment to think.

“I just don’t want them to be emotionally manipulated or brainwashed,” Josh said from the other room. I took a long gulp of water, then walked back into the living room.

“It’s just that I don’t know if I would be a Christian today if I hadn’t gone to camp,” I said, my throat tight. Shoot. Even I could hear the emotion in my voice. I didn’t want to cry.

I took a breath, then another sip. All those nights out in the woods, all those Bible studies and altar calls. Yes, my faith has changed since then, but God was first real to me at camp. I was afraid that my kids wouldn’t have any solid religious experiences. I wanted them to feel the warmth of a Christian community all around them as they explored the woods, sang hymns around a campfire, and portaged a canoe. I wanted them to trust Jesus with their lives and experience God for themselves.

“We don’t have to decide this tonight,” Josh said. He reached for my arm. He was right. Our daughter was only six, and it would be three more years before she was old enough for camp.

“It’s not emotional manipulation if you believe it’s true,” I said, turning away.

When it comes to our kids and religion, Josh and I have mostly fought in hypotheticals. We agreed that the kids would come to church with me and go to Sunday school. The rest we muddle through. What about Vacation Bible School? (Josh was not for it.) How about Bible stories at bedtime? (I would read the Bible to them but not push it.) Should we pray before meals? (We compromised by singing a blessing.)

But camp—even hypothetical camp—was clearly touching a nerve in me.

It was the second day of a forty-eight-hour “solo” on Lake Superior’s southern beach—the final challenge of a two-week-long wilderness trip that I was coleading for new students at Wheaton College. It was sort of like freshman orientation crossed with Survivor. After ten days of canoeing and hiking in the wilderness, twelve incoming freshmen were perched on individual rectangles of clear plastic—ground tarps that protected their sleeping bags from getting damp—and left alone for two days to fast and pray. Campers were strewn out in a long line along the shore—six to my right and six to my left—each one at a healthy distance from the next. There were no tents on solo, just ground tarps and sleeping bags, our ceiling the dramatic Northern Minnesota sky. Each camper in her own little hermitage.

Twice a day, my coleader, Alice, and I would walk between the campers along the shore and check on them. Speaking was discouraged—a thumbs up meant all was well. Some whispered that the fasting was making their bodies shaky, so I would slip them a graham cracker. Some whispered that they felt afraid, so I would squat down beside them to pray.

My lower half was nestled into a black-and-green sleeping bag, the cotton liner now bunched and twisted at the bottom. The morning air was chilly, so I slipped my light blue fleece on over my shoulders. It smelled of campfire and must. I felt my hair as I pulled on the warm layer, which was thick with grease—it had been nearly twelve days since I had showered. I fished around in my sleeping bag for my winter hat, then slipped it onto my head to cover my dirty hair, which felt slightly damp from the morning dew.

There was light enough for reading, I decided, so I grabbed my Bible and opened it to the Psalms. Someone had shown me the trick of reading the Psalm of the corresponding day (for example, on August 16 read Psalm 16), so I read aloud my daily Psalm to the giant lake. “LORD, you alone are my portion and my cup; you make my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.”

I was an incoming college junior, just two years older than the campers, and this was my fifth time leading a wilderness trip that summer. The director of the High Road program asked me to come lead Vanguard, this trip for incoming students, and I said yes. The freshmen girls were classic overachievers, but most were far out of their comfort zones learning to use a compass or throw a bear-bag rope. One girl introduced herself as: “Amy. A stands for my average grade and my bra size.” They were also spiritual overachievers and, like me, were brought up in church youth groups. They were pastors’ daughters who knew their Scriptures. Students could get a credit or two for doing this course if they completed the required reflection paper once they were on campus. Some were using the solo time to start on their assignments, mostly to finish reading the assigned texts.

One of those texts was a slim book, almost pocket sized, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer called Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community. Over the past two weeks, the group had formed its own version of Christian community on the microlevel—a group of strangers learning to canoe and portage and to cook something called “texturized vegetable protein” over a campfire. There was plenty of time for things to get ugly—girls crying in the tents at night, girls snapping at each other for not packing up the bear bag before dark, girls crossing their arms and turning away from their navigation partner when it was clear we were lost.

My coleader, Alice, emerged from the woods carrying a toothbrush, a headlamp perched on her head, and wool socks tucked into Chaco sandals.

“Hey, have you read that?” I asked. I pointed to Life Together, which was peeking out of her wet bag, alongside a Bible and spiral journal.

“I have read it, but a while ago. I was going to look through it so we could debrief a little with the girls after the solo is over,” she said. “Have you read it?”

“No,” I said.

“Here,” she replied, placing the slender book in my hands with a grin. “Read it this morning and then give it back. It’s a game changer.”

I picked up Life Together and started to read, pausing occasionally to copy down a sentence in my own journal. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together about his experiences in the Confessing Church, a small but devoted movement in Germany that opposed Hitler’s regime and sought to subvert it. They had high ideals—they were standing up to a demagogue at great danger to themselves.

Yet as I read, I discovered that, though Bonhoeffer’s group did stand up to Hitler, they struggled. If the Confessing Church had internal battles, was there any hope for the rest of us? Even Bonhoeffer’s community didn’t meet their mark. Bonhoeffer himself was executed after a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

The Confessing Church’s movement sparked hope for those in the church who felt bewildered and disillusioned at their religious leaders’ support for Nazism, and the war did end shortly after Bonhoeffer’s death. Though he didn’t kill Hitler, Bonhoeffer’s writings continue to inspire millions to take unpopular and even dangerous stands for their ideals.

I scratched out one sentence in my messy handwriting, making a mental note to read it in our group debrief later: “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”

When I told my friend Dana about our Bible camp impasse, she said, “Well, you don’t want Josh to always be on the outside, do you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, you already go to church on Sundays with the kids and he stays home, right?”

I nodded.

“So maybe the camp thing is just one more way he feels left out. Everybody in your family is doing Christian stuff except him. I’m not saying you shouldn’t send them to camp. I know it’s important to you. But you guys are your own little community, and everyone should feel like they belong in it.”

I nodded again, even while my insides twisted with fear. I want our kids to love Jesus, to know God’s presence when they paddle a canoe as I did. But maybe, in the long run, how Josh and I love and respect each other’s beliefs will make a bigger impact on our kids’ religious formation than whether they go to Bible camp.

In our marriage, neither of us carries executive authority. We argue and argue until, eventually, we find a solution we both can live with. Some days we can’t hear each other or see it from the other person’s perspective. I suspect we won’t make a decision about camp until the registration deadline comes and forces us to compromise.

Until then, our family wilderness adventures are composed mostly of Saturday hikes in nearby Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary. We fill up a few water bottles, including the dented Klean Kanteen we got on our honeymoon, and throw some granola bars and bruised apples into a backpack. At the trailhead, we pick the route called Lady’s Slipper Lane, which takes us on the boardwalk past native irises and cardinal flowers. Eliza skips ahead and Rowan uses a stick to poke every tree we pass.

As Josh stops to identify fungi growing on a downed log near our path, I remember Bonhoeffer’s warning to love people more than my visions for life—whether that vision is for Christian community or the perfect religious upbringing for my kids. It’s a struggle. I wonder if the work of love begins when our ideals shatter, when we’re forced to sort through the broken pieces together.

The kids race past us on the woodchip trail, and we climb the hill to join the prairie loop. In a few months, the asters, goldenrods, and blazing stars will be in bloom. It’s an ordinary thing, this family hike on a June day, but as we walk, I feel a surge in gratitude for our shared life together, this commitment to be a family where everyone belongs. At the top of the hill the kids jump out from behind a clump of trees to surprise us.

“I got you, I got you!” Rowan yells, delightedly, as Josh feigns shock. “Now you wait here,” Rowan says.

“Don’t come until we say so,” Eliza adds before they run ahead and find a new place to hide down the trail. Josh and I smile at each other, waiting in our queue in their game.

Not all our big dreams for life together come true. But as my friend Kendra wrote recently, pieces of them absolutely do.