Church Camp 2K20

Scrolling my social media feed today reminds me of going to church camp. I attended camp every summer of my childhood and remember it vividly. Every year I would return with a fire for the Gospel burning so hot in my soul that I thought no one at home understood me anymore. I was so deep.

This phenomenon happened to all of the campers. We called it a “spiritual high,” which in hindsight, is ironic in many ways. Every year I vowed that I would remain zealous as long as I lived, that I would never let my fervor fade.

But it always did.

If you squint, you can see a resemblance between the passion of my camp-going peers and recent followers of the Black Lives Matter movement. We vowed that we would always care this much about racial injustice no matter what. We shunned the idea of performance activism. We canceled people that didn’t speak loudly enough.

But for how long?

While these lifelong commitments are positive and necessary, they’re easy to make when we’re immersed in a culture of change. Plus, everyone else is doing it.

I bounced between spiritual high, disappointment, and guilt for years before I finally understood that my expectations for radical spirituality were unrealistic. (For context, I was only in middle school at the time.) Instead of making promises to myself that I would “never go back to the way I was,” I started to set smaller, daily intentions and measurable goals. I checked in with myself three and six months later to realign. I wrote it all down to ensure that I made progress, however steady. This long-game strategy worked for me before, and I believe it can work for all of us now.

My fellow white folks, let’s not allow our actions to fade with emotion. Let’s reassess our progress in three months, six months, next year, and everyday in between. Let’s write down our mistakes, because we will make them, and try hard not to make them again. Let’s not shame ourselves into paralysis. In whatever we do, let’s be allies.