Therapy

So I was away for a week at the Royal Family Kids Camp working as a relief Counselor. It was a good time...met some very neat kids, some very good adults and generally had a good week at camp. We stayed at the Green Oak Ranch down in the San Diego area--which apparently has a good deal of history itself with the old stage coach lines. I would have loved more time to find out more of that history, but that was more of a side note than anything else.

Anyways, I was out of the city and away from pretty much all types of media for a total of about 6 days...and it felt wonderful. Now, obviously I am not an anti-techie or anything like that. But at least once a year, preferably once every six months I have real value on getting away from the city and relishing the untouched, unrefined parts of life (though admittedly, in this case we weren't exactly "roughing it"--it was still camp). One night we went on a hike up a hill to a cross that overlooked a city that was on the other side of the hills that surrounded and enclosed the camp from the rest of the world. There was a full moon out, and even though you could see city lights at the top of the hill, generally the darkness was unbroken by anything but natural light in the sky. I stepped away from the campers for a moment and realized just how easy it was to believe in God and Christ in the middle of that quiet, moonlit night--and just how distracting the life in the city is. In the quiet of nature that isn't being interupted constantly by the noise we have grown accustomed too in the city, its not hard at all to believe without reservation, and its not even a struggle to decide to change one's life for a principle that you believe but cannot touch...it was truly theraputic.

I used to get time like this more often. My family would go on vacation somewhere out of the city, often to a resort on a lake, surrounded by lush grass and jungle and mountains. I would climb up to a tower and watch the sky or the sunset or the stars, or just look at the grass from the highest point around...and just absorb the beauty that was there, and when I came down, everything felt very different. I think that is an important point...the times that I removed myself and just appreciated nature to its fullest were not clouded by a lot of thought or agenda on my part. Sometimes I would pray, sometimes sing praise songs...but generally I would just watch, with as few deliberate thoughts as possible, and just enjoy what was there. In fact, often if there were concerns weighing me down, if I cleared my mind during these retreats to the top of the tower and didn't try to figure them out myself but just enjoy what God had created, when I came down I found that I had the answer almost without conciously understanding it beforehand...wisdom from God I believe. Perhaps this is why I really accept the statement in scripture that creation shows the glory of the Lord...I think God is evident in the world without the distraction of man's appetite.

This is all to say...I feel much better. I got (quite literally) beat up during this past week--from running around to wrestling with a dozen kids in the pool everyday...but I feel more rested and refreshed after these past 6 days than I have almost the whole Summer, and certainly since I last left the city to just rest in the untouched refuge of nature. I highly recommend it.