"The Shiloh Family"

In 2002, I was hired to work at a summer camp in New York that I knew very little about. I just knew that I always loved going new places and I thought it’d be a good chance for me to do something worthwhile with my summer. I had absolutely no idea what God had in store for me at this place. 

He intended for me to become part of a family of people.  He placed people around me at this camp that I will love and cherish forever. These people have truly shaped me into the person that I am today and the person that I hope to become. I had the blessing to be on staff with and have campers that challenged me. Challenged me in a way that other Christians truly should…

I met Chris Ewing who taught me the seriousness of our mission while we worked at Shiloh. He regularly kept our focus on the children that we were there to serve. And he helps keep my focus on my mission in life still today.

I met Robyn (Shores) Foster who taught me how to relate the Bible to everyone, even inner-city children. Even today, I remember the lessons that she wrote for us and I can explain them to almost anyone. What a gift from God to be able to put your faith in words!

I met Marcus Ewing who taught me how to love children and people in the most difficult times. He had a gift for working with kids even in the hardest of moments. He taught me about praising a child and respecting a child before you would ever criticize them. I think about the things he talked about every day as I work with children.

I met Teresa French who taught me the heart of a servant. She showed me how to work behind the scenes and never seek attention for yourself. She was always supporting others and had a selfless attitude. I consider this a Godly quality that I strive to have.

I met Nakeisha Vanterpool who taught me how to be an individual. She and her sister were different from the other campers, even in 2002. They stood up for what they believed in and they tried to do what was right even in adversity… a pretty amazing skill to have when you’re 11 years old.

I could go on and on. The people that He brings each year are special. As staff, we all come to this place thinking that we are there to make a difference. Then, we are each made better every summer as a result of the amazing kids that we meet and the peers that surround us.

Shiloh has taught me how important every human being is in the kingdom of God. It taught me not to judge a person or a child, but to love them. Even when it’s hard and even when that person doesn’t come in a nice, neat package, he calls me to love. God placed some children in our lives at Shiloh that came in very difficult packages, and God taught me to look past it and to love them. He taught me this lesson at Shiloh and he expects me to remember this lesson each and every day.

I pray for this place and this mission regularly. I still have pictures on my wall of Shiloh kids. And, beside those pictures, there is a verse. It says “This is the resting place, let the weary rest” – Isaiah 28:12.  I pray that Shiloh continues to be a place of rest for these children for years to come. I pray that it continues to influence the children that drive down that gravel driveway and that it changes the hearts of the staff that live in the cabins each summer. It is a special place and one that I will never forget…

                                                                   
~Kristi (Cooke) Barney

Kristi was a Cabin Counselor from 2002 until 2004 and returned to Shiloh in the summer of 2006 to serve as the Youth Counseling Director.  Kristi moved to New York City in 2006 and volunteered as a mentor in the High-Def program.  Kristi currently lives in Huntsville, Al with her husband Adam.  She works as a Speech Pathologist at United Cerebral Palsy where she works with children from birth to elementary-aged who have speech/ language disorders. 

 

The Fruits of the Spirit

I’ll always remember summer 2007. I have a hard time explaining a lot of the feelings to people who have never worked at Shiloh NYC. It was hard. Yet, it helped shape my views of the way God works in our lives and how we should always seek to build community. Some days I thought I was making no difference and wanted to run head-first into the nearby Catskill Mountains just to get away. The next day, or in some cases, the next hour, I saw real fruit. Let me explain some of the fruits of Shiloh as I experienced them.

Love is the heart of the camp. Love the kids. Show them Christ by loving them. Love would then come back around. It might be the last hour, but it would come. My darkest and brightest memory from teen session each came within an hour of each other. Maybe an hour before the bus pulled away, a camper had tagged a good portion of our porch with a marker. Before he left, I made him remove it all with sandpaper. I told him very sternly (possibly as serious as I had been the entire week) that I didn’t approve of his actions, but that I loved him. We both cried, and I think he understood. Of course, I’m sure he later realized he was off the hook. I took a deep breath and enjoyed breadsticks and endless pizza with the staff that hung around Camp that weekend. I learned in that situation that love from God does not always come from little hallmark cards and hugs. Sometimes, love comes from the streets of Brooklyn in baggy shorts and a heart that longs for direction.

Joy comes flowing out of every time of worship at camp. One of my favorite times at camp is celebration. The first day, the campers are excited just to learn the words. The second day, they’re shouting/singing “Jesus is my best friend”. What a joy it is just to hear them sing that tune. The last day, you end with celebration, and I fought the tears every time knowing I had to say goodbye. That goodbye was joyous, though. They had made new friends and had reason to be more than happy, but to experience what I would call joy.

Peace might be the last thing you think of when walking into the woods with 6 kids from the Bronx and Bridgeport, CT. Yet, each time, it seems, through a prayer time with two campers, or a morning pool workout with staff – there was peace. Almost every child taught me what it was like to be at peace, with God or with the world, while praying. Teresa French got me and a couple other staff members to do water aerobics a few mornings before anyone else was awake. We laughed a lot, but those were some very peaceful mornings. The days I got up before anyone else to journal about my experience made me most at peace. You get the kids out of the city, and it helps them find peace, too. They see things they’ve never seen before and are able to breathe fresh air. It doesn’t take work to see the fruits of peace, it just takes time.

The other fruits were shown day after day. Patience was obviously learned or otherwise exercised on an hourly, no, momentary basis. Kindness was shown in the willingness of the staff to serve the kids and each other. Goodness knows faithfulness, gentleness and self control were fruits that were used again and again without a second thought.

Those fruits will never go away and neither will the lasting relationships with campers and staff. I still keep in touch with a lot of the people I got to know that summer. They’re all mad wack (awesome), and so is Shiloh.

Daniel was a counselor at Camp Shiloh during the summer of 2007 and volunteered during 2008. He has worked as an IT professional at AmSurg for 2 years. During this time he completed 4 full marathons and 4 half marathons. He currently attends Ethos Church in Nashville Tennessee and leads a small group of runners that run to grow and encourage others through community and Christ. He volunteers at Room in the Inn’s Odyssey Program for individuals who were formerly homeless.

A Place of Love

     When asked to write an article for this blog, I thought it was going to be easy. I was wrong. After four years of working for Shiloh, I feel like there are hundreds of stories I could tell, all of which are meaningful to me, and all of which give a small taste of the many things that Shiloh does for its campers and its staff. And that’s where the difficulty comes in. What story can I tell to sum up what Camp Shiloh has meant to me?
      I’ve settled in on the story of a camper that I had in my cabin in the summer of 2008. I didn’t go into that summer expecting to be a cabin counselor. I had started off filling the position of Youth Counseling Director, but when third session rolled around, a counselor was needed in one of the cabins, so I got to re-enter the world of cabin counselors for a week and a half. This ended up being one of the most challenging sessions I would experience during my four-year stint with Shiloh, but I also had some of my favorite interactions with a camper named Ernesto.
      I’m not sure how many times Ernesto had been to camp, but I know this wasn’t his first year. He was aware of the camp’s expectations for its campers, and he continually made decisions to push the limits with my co-counselor Bradley and I. We had an unusually large cabin that session (10 campers), and there was really no way to keep an eye on every camper throughout the day. By the end of the session, our cabin was at odds with each other, and Ernesto was one of many campers that seemed to always end up at the center of the conflict. I probably broke up more fights within my cabin during that session than I ever had to break up in any other session, and somehow, I always seemed to end up one on one with Ernesto, talking through whatever conflict had taken place that day.
     The conversation that I remember most clearly took place a couple of days before the end of the session. The conflict in our cabin had peaked, and several of our campers had been involved in a situation that almost escalated to punches being thrown. We had to separate the majority of our campers, and I ended up one on one with Ernesto again. We spent the first 15-30 minutes in silence, kicking a soccer ball against a backstop, and just trying to cool down. The frustration from the continual conflict throughout the session had worn on both Ernesto and me, so I really feel like kicking that soccer ball as hard as we could was therapeutic for both of us. But after a time of releasing frustration, and shedding some tears, Ernesto and I shared one of the most meaningful conversations that I experienced in my time at Shiloh. He told me about a sickness that his grandmother (his primary guardian at the time) was experiencing, along with some of the other difficult things that were happening within his family. He told me that he didn’t like being frustrated all the time, and hated reacting out of anger, but that he didn’t know how to react differently. He communicated that he respected me, and that he was sorry for causing conflict in the cabin. And after we had both said, “I love you”, the last comment that I can remember hearing Ernesto say is that he wished he could be more like me.
     Unfortunately, some of the campers, including Ernesto, were sent home from camp early because of the situation that took place that night. I always hated seeing kids leave Shiloh early, but I felt that the conversations that we were able to have had been important. His story came to represent something about Shiloh that has always meant a lot to me. Shiloh is a place of growth. I’ve witnessed it in the campers, and I’ve witnessed it in the staff. You come as you are to Shiloh, and without a second thought, you are loved. I’ve had the opportunity to be on both ends of the spectrum during my time at Shiloh, trying to pour love into those, who like Ernesto, come to Shiloh needing it, and I’ve also received love from the staff and the campers when I probably didn’t deserve it. It’s something that’s hard to understand fully unless you’ve experienced it. But in short, God is love, and if you want to really know God in a deeper way, you should go to Shiloh.  

Tanner Albright 
Shiloh Alumni 2006-2009

Tanner worked at Camp Shiloh from 2006-2009.  He was a Cabin Counselor for his first three summers and served as the Youth Counseling Director his last summer.  He is currently working as the Resident Youth Minister at Central Church of Christ in Amarillo, Texas and volunteers with the Boys and Girls Club of Amarillo.