Okay, so I’m lying prone in a ditch with my arms folded, corpse-like, dressed in black and staring at a darkening sky. My back is stiff and I’m praying that wood ticks and West Nile virus mosquitoes don’t enjoy the free horizontal buffet.

I’m not a prisoner of war or an injured hiker, but I don’t know when I’ll be allowed to leave. I have no earthly reason for being here. I see the stars beginning to emerge as faint pinpricks across the sky. My white tennis shoes are dusted with pine needles, if only to better assist the camouflage. And then I hear the clang of the bell, and the distant roar of the army. They are coming for me.

So goes camper/counselor hide-and-seek, one of my many experiences last week as a middle school counselor at a Christian camp in the Sierra Nevadas.

I had felt from the beginning that God called me to do this, to spend six days in the woods with a beautiful crowd of dirt-streaked, insecure tweeners. How one is actually “called by God” I still don’t know, but the fact that I even showed up proves that He compels us to do the impossible.

If you’ve done the junior high camp thing—not as a camper, but as an adult volunteer—you know my angst. I cannot ever remember being so young as to enjoy the sound of intestinal gas for 45 straight minutes, long after midnight. Did I ever discover love in the brief stare of a boy on the other side of a bonfire? Was I really so enamored with candy as to spend half of my savings on a jawbreaker the size of a bowling ball? And, of course, it’s only at camp where one can accept Christ, “die to self”, and rededicate his life to the Lord all in the span of four days. The seemingly unintelligent design of an adolescent eventually gives way to evolutionary maturity—the process of change that brings us miraculously from there to here. For some reason, a twelve year-old demonstrates this scientific gap between what we once were and what God can do with us.

I wish I had some brilliant spiritual analogy for you. I gave it my best shot all week, but none of them seemed right. I don’t think the belly flop competition is an effective metaphor for our spiritual failure. Sunburn, I discovered, is a cheesy analogy for God’s “love rays.” And please, please know that only John Donne has the rhetorical skill to make a literary conceit out of a flea bite. So all I have left is the beautiful stories of how God takes flawed children and their flawed overseers, and turns them both into children of God.

Yes, they were coming for me. On that night, 550 of them were on the hunt to find a prized catch—a counselor crouching in the dark with a bounty on her head. My hiding place was brilliant. One twelve year-old almost stepped on me as he crossed the field in the dark. But when the game ended forty-five minutes later, I crawled out of my bunker and felt victorious. It was not unlike Saturday morning, when the parents’ cars and old church school buses rattled their way up the mountain to get us. I had survived.

I was headed for my soft, quiet mattress, my family, and deep conversations again. I would even get to scrub my ears and toes for ten minutes in a hot shower. But I would miss the small things, the fist pounds with misfit kids, the ridiculous lumberjack dance, the long conversations with little women, the uninhibited worship in a dimly lit room of tadpoles. It's a good thing God calls us to strange places.