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BY JOHN HARRELL

Yes, for the record, they were cheeseballs.

If you overhear a kid at church talking about throwing cheeseballs at a counselor's shaving cream-covered head, or of dropping chocolate-covered marshmallows onto the nose of a teammate for points, don't worry: we knew it was going on.

If they tell you about riding an inflatable banana with five other people behind a motorboat and plunging into the river, or about falling from about 50 feet in the air on a giant swing, relax: we knew about that, too.

We do some crazy things here at West River Center. Picture an Oreo stuck to a boy's forehead or a crowd of waddling campers yelling "a-doo-dee-dot" with their tongues stuck out. Picture dodge ball late at night or loud singing just after breakfast.

And there are, of course, the campfires and s'mores, archery, nature walks, cannonballs in the pool - the time-tested, tried-and-true camp experiences.

Here kids can be kids, as at almost anywhere that offers such programs for children. So what makes a place like West River or Manidokan different from the other camps youth can attend in the summertime?

It's the impact of Jesus Christ. Here at camp, we have a chance to live a life of Christian community: doing fun things by day and hearing God's Word preached at night, most of it in large groups. Here is where a boy at the pool can ask his counselor tough theological questions while elsewhere a bunch of kids fall off the banana boat into the river, where a girl can climb a 24-foot wall the same week she stands by the swimming pool at a baptism renewal and publicly identifies herself as a Christian.

The element that Christ adds to our time here makes church camp special because it allows us to offer campers a package deal: we provide a place for kids to be kids while

trying, too, to give them a nugget of wisdom from God's Word. At the end of the day, after we've done important things like chasing waves on a motorboat and playing "Capture the Flag," we can talk about other important things like redemption, peacemaking, sin, living life as a committed Christian, how God can use each camper's talents to serve him.

Don't get nervous if a camper at your church mentions the turtle the size of your cat - It really exists - but also don't get nervous if he or she mentions the lesson (from Matthew 18) on how to resolve conflict with another Christian.

Likewise, when they talk about hearing a testimony by another camper about how God delivered her from a self-destructive practice, or when they talk about seeing their sin disappear before their eyes, so to speak, as we destroyed index cards to illustrate the completeness of God's forgiveness, it's really okay. It's part of how we serve young saints.

Here some kids might respond to the Gospel of redemption for the first time, and others might discover that next step deeper into a life already committed to the Lord.

Perhaps a child from the inner city has heard the good news that yes, it's possible to live in peace with one another, and maybe teenagers from the Facebook generation have learned that there's a God who knows not just their screen names, not just their real names, but their entire life situation through and through and loves them.

Maybe we plant seeds here and maybe we water them. Hopefully, we do both. But the campers are coming back to you now and they need to be nurtured, lest the momentum of their mountaintop experiences here be lost. Know, love and accept your campers in the days, weeks and months to come, challenge them to remember what they learned and to live as disciples of Jesus, walking and thinking as he does.

God willing, we'll be ready for them again next year.

Watch your head for cheeseballs.

John Harrell was a counselor at West River this summer. He is a young adult leader in the Baltimore-Washington Conference.