Part 15 B Unexpected Revelations--Camp Good News

I can’t even tell you how sad it makes me to write this. When I think of Camp Good News, I think of friends, tall green trees, puddle jumping, and horses. I was completely, 100% for CGN as a ministry, a place of beauty, and as a respite from my parents. But today I realized something that unnerved me. I regularly have nightmares about this place. Some of them, I don’t understand, like numerous ones where I’m being attacked (always involving the hill leading up to Bascoms pond. I don’t know why. I have no memories of trauma there). The others make perfect sense. When the dream starts, I’ve discovered that my mom wants me to be on camp staff and I’m late to training. As the dream continues, I’m filled with anxiety because I need rest but I can’t move one heavy foot in front of the other. I’m disappointing everyone for the simple reason that I’m a limited human and not the superhuman they think I am. Then, I always wake up relieved to be away from that place, and trust me, that makes me sadder than anyone out there who is a current Camp Good News fan. 

My most positive memories of camp were from being a camper. I relished it. In fact, my most vivid memories of childhood are camp memories, while many other parts of my childhood are blank question marks. I sincerely believe that this is because camp was such a light for me in comparison to my home life. I do believe I experienced some spiritual abuse there, because I remember “getting saved” repeatedly out of terror and going to sleep in my bunk bed afraid of waking up in hell. When I was 11, my parents became the camp directors. The abuse I remember most vividly was when I was a volunteer and a staff member (under their leadership for half of my summers) during my high school summer breaks. That was when I was taught how to be an abuser.

It started with being in Teen Service (cleaning bathrooms, setting tables, and washing dishes). We did huge amounts of work, and jokingly begged for naps. One day, our leader came and told us that we were to take a mandatory rest. I was confused, so I pressed for more information. Not surprisingly, someone had just added up our hours of work, and we had reached the legal limit that a minor can work. I felt quite validated because the State of New Hampshire thought I wasn’t lazy; I was just overworked and tired. But we still did the dishes for the rest of the week, and at the end of each week, we were called to the camp office and told to sign papers to say that we hadn’t gone over the legal limit. I distinctly remember thinking that I had to lie and sign those papers because I didn’t want this great ministry to be brought down over such a minor issue.

The really tragic thing about camp was how their authority structure worked. The next summer, when I became a counselor, I was trained in how to control kids using the Bible. I was given methods for spiritually abusing them just like I had been abused. Every week, I got a fresh cabin full of giggling little girls, and I taught them that Romans 13 said that obeying their camp counselor meant that they were obeying God. Likewise, I believed I was obeying the authority that had trained me in these methods, and on up the chain it went. Any time a camper even felt negative emotion, I was to try to help her see how this was a shortcoming that she needed to “be saved” from. For example, if a camper was homesick and crying for her mother, I would show her verses about how she was not trusting God with her fear and redirect her to “The Wordless Book.” If she accepted everything I said, the next morning, I would report it to the higher ups, who would put a star on the wall in the Dining Hall. The stars were the staff’s pride and joy—our salvation tallies. 

The Wordless Book

Female counselors were asked to enforce rigid modesty checks that, at times, really alienated us from campers, and I think I followed those rules more obediently than any other staff member. I remember feeling culture shock one weekend when I went out to eat and saw, of all things, girls wearing short shorts and spaghetti straps openly! In public! These women didn’t even have a human element in my eyes because all I could see were sinners in need of a Saviour.

My final summer at camp was incredibly difficult. I had just moved out of my parents house, was experiencing culture shock (having come from South Africa), was dealing with a roller coaster of a college application (which camp didn’t have the internet for me to keep up on), and was dealing with some personal issues. It was the first summer that I didn’t fit the mold of the perfect counselor, and I felt guilty for being exhausted. I know that this is where my most of my anxious, over-achiever camp dreams come from, because I felt utterly alone and like a total failure. I had been taught by my abusers to give 200%, to always sacrifice myself for others whenever possible, and that taking anything for myself was sinful, so I kept at it.

I’m replenishing from this season even now, almost 6 years after I left camp for the final time. I’ve often wondered if I would ever introduce my family to this place that has meant so much to me. Every time I play out the scene in my mind, though, I feel like a spiritual pariah entering the camp grounds. I am not the missionary they raised me to be. I wear clothes they shame women for wearing. I would never let my children be campers there. In fact, what I’d really want my family to see isn’t the camp programs at all, but the woods, the beaver ponds, the dirt roads, and the mountain streams I came to know so well. I wouldn’t be allowed to explore those again by myself, so I have no reason to return.

I have no reason to ever return to any institution that made me afraid of the God I’ve learned to love. 

My final week at CGN