Intern Story--Bekah

My story with Camp of the Woods actually starts back in the middle of my high school days, when I was taking summer trips up to Sioux Lookout with my youth group from Kishwaukee Bible Church in DeKalb, IL. We would come up for the week of Blueberry Fest to help run a VBS and do service projects with Calvary Baptist Church. Each year, we would spend a night out at Camp of the Woods; spending the evening tubing, swimming, eating, and just hanging out. After the trip of my senior year, I remember having a conversation with a couple of the other girls about how cool it would be to spend more than just a week serving in the community of Sioux Lookout, how great it would be to get really invested. The conversation came at the end of an amazing week, and though it was fun to think about, I wrote off the idea as a sort of mission trip emotion high. God had a very different plan though!

Fast forward two months, to about the middle of October, and I found the majority of my waking thoughts focused on Northwest Ontario. Honestly, I was pretty confused. I was finishing out school at our community college that semester, and was trying to find a sort of gap year program to leave home for a while. Sioux Lookout was just a town in another country to which I had minimal connection and definitely didn’t have any sort of gap year opportunities. Sure, I could serve at church, but I would have to find myself an apartment and a means of income; which as a U.S. citizen is virtually impossible. But the idea had been constant in my head for way too long, so I reached out to Ron and Jen Keres. The Keres’s are a missionary couple sent from my home church to a First Nations community north of Sioux Lookout. At the time, they were still in Sioux preparing to make the move even farther north. When I reached out and asked the simple question of, “Is there any sort of opportunity or possibility here for me,” they were immediately very enthusiastic about moving me up there. And I was a little bit shocked! I had expected the conversation to be the “no” I needed to remove the thoughts bugging me and get me to move on. Yeah that didn’t happen. By December, I was planning on moving to Canada to spend at least a year serving and relationship building in the community of Sioux Lookout and with CBC.

The biggest issue, however, was getting me across the border for an extended period of time. And that’s where COTW came into the picture. It was suggested to me that because camp had a great relationship with the border, I should summer staff and get a work permit through them. Honestly I do not remember how that grew into a full on internship, but it did very quickly and I am so incredibly grateful it did!

Up to the day I moved, my experience with camp included two evening visits during our summer trips and several phone calls as I prepared to move. Here I was, a person who took forever and a day to build relationships, never having been away from home for more than 2 weeks, up and moving to a different country to a camp with a handful of people I had met twice and did not remember at all and even more people I had never met…….yeah I have no idea what I was thinking. I can say without a doubt it was all God getting me up here, because there is no other way I would have dropped my life in the States for a brand new one here with as much peace and confidence as I did.

One evening Chapel, Summer 2018

From about two days after I moved, I knew COTW was going to be home. The Bates family and Kane family immediately welcomed me as their own, and it miraculously only took a couple weeks for them to become my new comfort zone. The summer was spent cabin leading, team captaining, and settling into the place I would spend the next stage of life. As fall rolled around, I quickly learned that the “off season” of camp is not an off season at all, but one that provides countless opportunities to engage with campers in town and outside the structure of summer camp. Camp was not all that I jumped into, though. My original desire to serve in Sioux was not forgotten, and as soon as the schedule allowed, I jumped in with the youth group at CBC.

Helping at Vacation Bible School with Calvary Baptist Church during Sioux Lookout's Blueberry Festival

As I write this, I’m a month shy of living at camp for two years now. The first year was full of very new experiences; from leading a cabin full of 10 year old girls to grocery shopping for one; from writing devos to welding; from jumping on keys for worship to plowing snow. The second year has been full of much of the same, but also a lot more relationship building and leadership skills development. I extended my original one-year plan for simply that; to continue the relationships I had with certain campers and a lot of the youth group girls; and it has turned into learning how to run camp events, being the person who takes initiative, and being ok with a role of leadership

Wilderness Bible Club

Three years ago, if you had told me I’d be spending the next big stage of my life interning at a Bible camp in Northern Ontario and getting invested in the community of Sioux Lookout, I would have probably laughed. But thank goodness God knows so much better than we do what we need and where we’re going, and He definitely directed this one! I’m so thankful for the challenges, opportunities, growth, and relationships He’s given me over my time here. I can’t imagine life now without my camp family; and as I prepare to move back home in the fall, I’m excited to learn life with a very different perspective. I can’t wait to see the final adventures God has in store for me over these last several months!

With campers Summer 2018