My son’s fearlessness is baffling me. He leaves today for camp, and from what I can tell, he’s not taking a single worry with him. No anxiety, no butterflies in the belly. Nothing but his wide-eyed, eight-year-old self.
Like camp mothers before me, I lovingly washed and labeled each piece of his clothing yesterday. While pondering the odd sensation of writing with a Sharpie on Superman underwear, I also thought of the two-year-old boy who howled and sobbed when we dropped him off at the church nursery for 90 minutes. We bribed him with everything imaginable, but when at last he thought to bring his Pooh Bear along—combined with just the right teacher who eagerly included Pooh in all the snacks and crafts—his screaming subsided and we were able to go to church peacefully.
I thought of the one-year-old little boy with a death grip around my neck at our “Mommy and Me” swim class. Now he’s counting the minutes until he can be launched off the blob, into an icy lake, by some portly 11-year-old. He smiles at the idea of riding the zipline—the longest in North America, I might add—over this same lake.
I also thought of the sequence of events in my own life that have brought us to this day. I visited Eagle Lake Camp for the first time in 1994. Many days in my 20s were spent writing stories about camp for The Navigators and interviewing parents about their children’s experiences. And with just a blink of an eye (and 31 hours of labor), I’ve now become one of those parents.
I thought of Dawson Trotman and Lorne Sanny—the first Navigator leaders who started Eagle Lake in 1957—and their passion for ministering to young boys. They knew this is where you reach a man’s heart—inside the body of a boy. I thought of the many men I’ve met through The Navigators over the years, men with such depth of character and sold-out commitment to God. These are qualities I pray for my son, and I know they take root early on. Kevin and I do all we can to nurture that process along, but the investment and influence of a 21-year-old godly dude on a zipline will go further than I’ll ever know.
The undies are labeled now, the clothes are packed, alongside Braden’s Bible and a little notebook he requested to use as a journal. I tried to throw in a comb, but was told, “If you pack that, I’m not gonna use it.” (This journey is as much about me letting go of control as it is about Braden, I think.) The only one around here who seems wrought with emotion is me, even though I know he’ll be fine. My friend Craig, who used to run the camp back when I was writing about it, used to come down the mountain every August and say, “Well, no one died and no one got pregnant. It was a good summer.” I’m fairly certain neither of those things will happen to my boy, either. Much more likely, he’ll come down the mountain with a new sense of adventure and confidence, a jumble of incredible memories, and a heart more sensitive to the God of the universe. Not bad for $350 and a little separation anxiety for mom.
