A Place to Belong

by Sarah Blasing, Camp Director

This is the summer when I felt like I belonged at camp. You would think that belonging came as a de facto part of being the director. However, as it turns out, belonging always takes time. Geoffrey Cohen wrote a whole book titled Belonging and how it is cultivated. However, I can’t find a quote anywhere that describes this better than one of my camp staff—Akos Konkoly—did in his campfire talk this summer.

It wasn’t anything flashy that made me feel like I belonged. It was just the consistent showing up, with patience, and kindness, and some weird crazy energy at 8am. It was people who didn’t know me, that decided I mattered anyway.

Camp is one of the few places where we get the opportunity to show one another this kind of unconditional love and acceptance. Where else do you show up and decide to live, work, and eat with people you didn’t really know beforehand for an entire week? Or for the staff, for eleven entire weeks. Even when you come to camp with a friend or a sibling, you don’t come having had this kind of full immersion living before.

But simply having this opportunity that life at camp provides is different than taking it. If we went the whole week without actually sharing our true selves—fears and flaws and all—with one another, then it would just be another week. This is what I’ve been working on for four years during my time as director, and although dividends have come every year, they came crashing in this year. 

One of the main ways I have tried to foster this is by establishing required winter counselor retreats as part of the counselor training program. These retreats are loosely modeled after a retreat series called “Teens Encounter Christ” which has been around since the seventies. Returning counselors are invited to give talks that progressively move from more surface level topics like “Who am I?” to deeper stories like “Where am I?” that explore difficult seasons of their lives and what they’ve learned from them. When new counselors experience these retreats for the first time, they immediately learn that this community is one where it is safe to be who exactly who you are, struggle and all. They also learn that some of the best things in life, like belonging and feeling loved and supported, come from being willing to be authentic and vulnerable.

This summer was the first summer where all of my staff had experienced three years of these retreats as high school counselors, which is because we started them in 2022. And night after night this summer, the depth of the campfire talks they wrote this summer showed it. The vulnerability my staff showed trickled down into the depth of connection campers were able to have with one another. It even trickled down—in a full circle kind of way—to me.

Akos concluded his talk by sharing a story about two weary and thirsty travelers who stumble upon a well with no bucket. Thankfully, one of them had a bucket with a rope in his pack, and after quenching their thirst and continuing on, the traveler gives the bucket away to his new friend.

This camp community lifted me up when I felt like an outcast, and that pushed me to build communities based off love in places back home after leaving camp. We all end up at wells—thirsty, tired, unsure, and thinking we’re supposed to have all the answers and fix everything ourselves. But love—the kind of love that builds community—shows up quietly, it offers what it has, and it stays long enough to walk with you. And you know what’s maybe the most sacred part of that story? It is that love knows that the bucket was never its to keep. It was always meant to be passed on.

The gift of camp is so much more than the fun and games. Camp is a place where we can learn how to take the risk to show up as our whole selves, with both gifts and needs. This is what belonging in community is like, and it is what camp has given even to me.