Life's Snapshots: June 27- July 2- First Trip

I got the chance to be on a trip of students who are being trained as future leader for a camp in Seattle. They serve one week doing housekeeping type activities come and do adventure activities with us for a week and then go back to their camp and do another week of housekeeping serving. The trip included rock climbing, hiking and rafting. It was originally suppose to include a backpacking component but because of the abnormally late summer we have been having all of our overnight course areas are choked with snow so we are unable to use them since the students did not come prepared for snow but for summer weather. Rock climbing and rappelling were challenging for these students as they had to face their fears of heights. One student in particular was not at all excited to be dangling off the side of the rock face. Our goal was just to get to the edge and look over. She wasn’t able to fully trust the ropes and harness to hold her. She said she hadn’t ever been able to trust anyone ever to catch her. As we neared the edge there were tears, nerves, shaking and comforting but in the end she was never able to fully trust the harness. I believe she thought she was fully trusting the harness but it never was actually holding all of her weight because she was unable to lean back and sit in the harness trusting it to hold her. But that is where she was at. For her it was a huge step to be up there “trusting” the harness. But that is also a great picture of faith that we think we are trusting and sitting back in our harness but in actuality we are still doing things in our own strength, with our own legs holding us instead of trusting the ropes.