It was July 2024. I was sitting in my office, when I received an email from Bear Creek Camp. Bear Creek Camp is the outdoor ministry of the Northeastern PA and Southeastern PA Synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. My email notifier pinged twice, because it arrived in two of my inboxes: my home and my church email addresses. My connection to Bear Creek is both personal and professional, so I’m on their mailing list in both identities. I saw the same subject line twice: “Tragic Loss at Bear Creek Camp.”

I winced, and started saying quietly, “No, no, no, no.” It was summer, and the fifth week of camp was in session. As I moved my mouse to click on the link, I was hoping, hoping that the message would be something like, “Fire burned down two camp buildings.” Or, “The camp’s endowment was embezzled.” Not that I wanted those things. Not at all! But if there was a “tragic loss,” please let it be anything but that. Please, please, please not that.

I began to read the email. It was indeed that. A camper had drowned at camp the day before. My heart immediately broke. I felt like a part of me was ripped out. My vision shrank to a narrow tunnel as I read

…The camper went missing…

…swiftly located in the water, unresponsive…

… Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) arrived…

… Despite the best efforts…

“Our community is devastated,” the email read. Oh God, of course they were devastated. Dozens of college-age counselors, hundreds of campers, a handful of permanent staff, all formed a community every year at Bear Creek. It’s a community that I’ve been a part of for as long as I can remember. I was a camper there for nine years in my childhood. I was a one-week volunteer chaplain there for five summers. I served on the camp’s Program Committee, and on its Board of Directors. I now have a child who’s been going there for the past eight years.

It’s a community that’s been in my family for generations. My sister was on summer staff for several years, and rose to become Summer Assistant Director. My father has spent time on the Board of Directors and various camp committees. Both of my parents were counselors at Bear Creek’s predecessor camps. I don’t know if I’ve ever spent twelve consecutive months without driving down the long red dirt road.

It’s a community that runs so deep and so wide. Hundreds and hundreds of people consider themselves part of this community – whether they were campers, counselors, parents, friends, or connected in some other way. It’s a community that is based on God’s grace – through its 3000 acres of untouched forest, through its well-designed programming, through compassionate and loving staff, the camp has shared God’s love with children and adults for fifty years. And so many of us who have been touched by the camp feel a sense of stewardship, a sense of belonging, a sense that it is our place. Sometimes that’s healthy and sometimes it’s not, but it comes from a place of love, and it runs very, very deep.

I am sure that I am not the only person miles and miles away from the camp who felt this tragedy on a deep level that day in July. When I heard the news, I was scared. I was scared for the family of the child – how could they possibly deal with this? My own child had been at camp just a few weeks earlier. I thought of how I’d feel if I had received that horrid, horrid phone call.

I was scared for all the other campers who were there, and all the counselors as well. I was scared for the counselor who found the child, and attempted CPR. How would that counselor ever move past this trauma? I was scared for the future of the camp. What would this mean? Lawsuits? Liability? Closure? Would this powerful ministry be lost?

And all I wanted to do was help. I wanted to drop everything and drive up there to be there as – I don’t know, a pastoral figure? A source of counseling? I didn’t even know what I could do. But I wanted to help. I wanted to fix it.

I was able to reach out to a colleague of mine who had been a volunteer chaplain at Bear Creek the week before – turns out she, along with several other chaplains, had been called back to the camp to help in the wake of the tragedy. I also reached out to an old friend of mine who is currently serving on the Board of Directors. He was in contact with the camp director, and was ready to head up and help if that’s what the director needed. I was grateful that these people I trusted were there helping, but it became clear to me that I had no role there, and that sat so sorrowfully in me.

There have been times in the past when I might have been one of the people they called for help. A year when I was a chaplain, or a year when I was on the board. But now my only real roles right now were “parent of a camper” and “alumnus.” And so I had to wait. I had to sit and pray. If I drove up there in all my emotions, I would only be a hindrance, a nuisance. So I waited.

I thought, I’ll get over it. I told myself that I had nothing to get over. After all, it’s not like I’m the one who suffered. How dare I feel so strongly! Do I think that I’m some kind of victim, compared to the family of the child who died? Do I think that my feelings compare to those who were present at the lake when the drowning occurred? I berated myself for my strong emotions.

But that self-attack didn’t help anything. And my feelings were real. I was suffering. Now of course the suffering of the family, and even of the counselors, was incredibly worse than mine. They’re not even in the same galaxy. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t experience suffering. I tell that to people at church all the time – that there’s no need to compare suffering. It doesn’t matter if someone “has it worse” than you do – that doesn’t mean you don’t have it bad.

So over the next few days, I tried to figure out what it was, what exactly was causing this pain inside me. My kid was scheduled to return for a second week at Bear Creek in session seven (two weeks after the incident), but I didn’t think this was about fear of that. I still trust the leadership of the camp – if anything, I knew that the incident would make another tragedy less likely, as they’d surely be reviewing all of their protocols. I wasn’t scared to send my kid to camp. This was more personal.

I started thinking about how much Bear Creek Camp is home to me. It’s the only place I have that has been consistent since my childhood. My parents no longer live in the house, or the town, where I grew up. I have no relatives or friends left there. The few connections I still have from high school are people who have moved away like me. I have precious little connection with the church I grew up in. Longtime readers of this blog know that I have made pilgrimages to see places that were important to me as a child. And while those have been powerful and meaningful, each time I was an outsider there as an adult (and in some cases perhaps even a trespasser). But Bear Creek Camp is different. It’s still there, and while there have been a lot of changes, it’s still in so many ways the same camp I remember. The same life is there. And I am still welcome there.

I have always been welcome there. I have always felt safe there. I have always felt unconditional love and grace there.

And I think that’s why this news hurt. Suddenly my safe space felt … unsafe. Suddenly the place where I knew everything would be alright felt … dangerous. And suddenly the place where I thought I always had a role to play … didn’t need me.

I knew that what happened at camp wasn’t about me. I knew that my suffering was so minuscule compared to that of others. But I also knew that this was something I needed to walk through. Something I needed to process. It was my safe place crumbling. I needed to figure out what that meant to me. I needed to see if it would still be a safe place for me going forward. I needed to start looking around and seeing where else I had safe places right now.

While I was working through this, I received another email from the camp. This one was just to my personal email address, as it was addressed to parents of children planning to attend sessions seven and eight. The email was honest and solemn about what happened. They shared that session six had been canceled so all the staff and counselors could do some processing together and apart. Sessions seven and eight were going to happen as scheduled, though. They shared some changes that would be made. They offered refunds to anyone who wished for one.

And I did take my kid back to camp for session seven. In my brief conversations with camp staff that day, it was clear to me that campers were as safe there as they ever were. They took the incident seriously, were learning from it, and were more committed than ever to the safety and well-being of the children in their care. Bear Creek Camp is, as ever, a place of adventure and courage and peace and love. It’s not perfect. Tragedies can happen, even there. But God’s grace and love abounds.

Featured Image by edoardo denunzio from Pixabay.