God's Week of Camp

This was by far the hardest week of Urban Arts camp. But it taught me so much and streached my character in ways I never would have imagined. The entire week was constantly changing minute by minute and I was having to remind myself to be "flexie cookie". (that's a whole different story for another time)

I found out on Monday afternoon that the kids would be only having four full days of camp because the ministry we were partnering with had a roller skating field trip planned for all 175+ people on the last day. Since we lost a day this drastically changed our game plan for teaching the performance pieces to our 45 kids.

On Tuesday I wanted to get confirmation about our performance time and location. The church we were holding the camp in was not open on Friday so we would not be able to do our afternoon performance on their amazing stage. Plan B-find another location. Ha! It sounds simple, but then we have to think about a dress rehearsal and transportation for the kids, etc. The decision was made that the dress rehearsal would take place at our original location on the stage on Thursday if we could get permission. We would use the sound equipment from another church volunteering at the elementary camp that week. Pushing the dress rehearsal up a day cause the class schedules and art classes to be bumped around again. Once that was all settled we continued to move through Tuesday and Wednesday fairly smoothly. Thursday came at us more quickly than realized. All morning we worked with the kids on the stage, blocking and rehearsing where they would stand for the OTHER stage which was a different size. All in all, it went fairly well. Some of the boys didn't want to participate and were acting up, but I believe it is because they were nervous about practicing in front of the girls and other helpers. As we went through the rehearsal, they became more comfortable and started to participate more. Thursday afternoon was spent finishing the t-shirts the kids would wear for the performance and completing their art projects.

My team arrived at the performance location (new church) about 12:30. The kids were arriving at 1:15 from roller skating and we were going to run through the program before the 2:00 performance. At 12:45, after things were loaded in and we were going to check the sound, I realized something was missing. The sound equipment. Um, major problem. I contacted my "go-to" person from the ministry and found out that the volunteer church had already packed up their system because they thought we would be using the church's equipment. My "go-to" person said that we did not get permission from the church to use their sound equipment. I admit, I started to freak out. How do you have a quality performance that is dependent on sound without sound? A good friend of mine who was there took me aside and said, "Katie, we need to pray. God has this figured out." She was right. As people were praying, others were on their cell phones pulling out all of the stops to get favors owed to them and ending up owing favors. Central Detroit Christian, the ministry we were partnering with this week, had a Fender portable sound system and 2 mics we could use. That was a good start. I knew though that we would need monitors as well as speakers. That system only had 2 speakers. Kensington Community Church agreed to let us use their portable Fender system as well. Someone actually drove it 40 minutes down to the performance location within minutes of getting permission from KCC. Here's the cool thing-we didn't know that both systems were the same and could work together. When we hooked everything everything up, it worked beautifully.

The kids were excited to perform and as I looked at them fueled up in their seats, ready to go, I realized that what matters the most is being a light to these kids. Giving them an opportunity to grown in Him and encouraging them. I God did that this week. It was His week.