Boy did this bring back memories ...

A little over a month ago, a group of men from our church decided we needed to camp out and share time and fellowship together.  I don't have any statistics on which I can base this guess, but I think a number of churches are suffering from a lack of action and leadership from the men of the church. Again, I don't have any sound basis to say this, but when I hear men from churches here and from back in Ohio talking about this, and ministers lamenting a lack of action and leadership in their church, I have to think there might be something going on.  You know, where there is smoke there is fire.

I don't think our desire was to just go out and camp overnight some place.  We had done a couple of outings for an afternoon or an evening leading up to this  and we were looking for the "what's next" thing. That's when a few of us who were sitting around after a study night came up with the theme -- "Cast and Blast."

The thing that would make this different was that we were going to involve more men in the leadership roles and we were going to take them away from their beds for a night.  We were going to cook our meals, maybe catch our dinner from the lake, we were going to do some things none of us/them had ever done before and we were going to ask them to bring their sons or grandsons too.

This resulted in about 40 men and boys spending a Friday afternoon, evening and all day Saturday out in a nature setting, camping out.

So, let me show you some of the things we did:

A couple of the young boys knew they had to set up a tent if they wanted to be in out of the cold, and it really got a bit cold that night.

Jonathan really couldn't wait to try out his smoker. We had chickens and fixins for dinner Friday, bacon and eggs for breakfast, and burgers for lunch.

There was also a good bit of "supervising" and telling stories while waiting for the dinners.

Put some Army uniforms on these guys and they would have taken a page out of some of my field training.

The kids really enjoyed the knife and axe throwing taught that day. This picture is not staged -- he really hit it dead center.

Here are some more pictures of the meals we had, starting with breakfast on Saturday.

Of course, no Southern camp-out would be complete without some shootin' .  We shot a lot of clay birds and there were several of the men and almost all of the boys who had not shot a shotgun before, especially at a flying clay bird.  If you haven't tried this, it really is fun and when you get the hang of it, it gives you something to brag about (because it's not easy).

But before any shootin' could take place, we had to have a playin' of the pipes, like the old Scotish Warriors did before they went to war. Nobody going to war, but it might have sounded like it at times. We were shootin' so much, a beaver that lived in the lake came over to see what all the racket was.

 

All in all, it was a really good time. We thanked John for the use of his property and managed to keep all the cars and trucks out of the wheat field. We must have hit on something because a number of these men have stepped up recently and taken on leadership roles. They also had fun with their kids and grand kids and kinda gave some meat to the words of Proverbs 22:6 "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."  We spent time training them to respect nature, trained them how to use and respect firearms, and talked to them around the fire on Friday night about goodness and Godliness.

What a good time.  What a great investment in these men and youngsters. I think our church benefited greatly those two days.

So, what's next?  Well, we have a baseball outing for families coming up on June 5 at the Carolina Mudcats and we tentatively have a golf scramble scheduled  for September.  Looking forward to these events.

Oh yeah, if you are wondering, I did play revellie in the morning at 0600.  Just couldn't help myself!!

“A great many people, and more all the time, live their entire lives without ever once sleeping out under the stars.” (Alan Kesselheim)

HOOAH