Forever
camping. I am persuaded that the whole purpose of camping is to make a person long for home! On that first day in the woods, putting up the tent is exciting, but three days later your tent has unpleasant odors you can’t explain. You love the taste of food cooked over an open flame (that’s ash!), but three days later you are tired of foraging for wood and irritated by how fast it burns. You were excited at the prospect of catching your dinner from the stream running past your campsite, which is reported to be teeming with trout, but all you have snagged are the roots on the bottom. You’re now four days in and your back hurts, there seems to be no more felled wood to forage, and you’re tired of keeping the fire going anyway. You look into what was once an ice- and food-filled cooler to see the family-sized steak you have reserved floating gray and oozing in a pool of blood-stained water. Suddenly you begin to think fondly of home. You think of your soft and inviting mat- tress, the stove in your kitchen where you just twist a knob and get flame, the red New York strips you left in the freezer, and the house that you are pleased to call your home. You stand there hop- ing that someone will break the silence and say, “Why don’t we go home?” Your four days in the wilderness have accomplished their mission. They have prepared you to appreciate home! But generally in America we treat camping as a destination rather than a temporary location. We camp in sixty-foot motor homes that have a kitchen like Emeril Legasse’s, a forty-two-inch flat screen, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing. We work to make the campsite more comfortable than home! No wonder we don’t care if we ever return. No wonder we want life to be one endless vacation. No wonder we want to pack it all in. But the pack-it-all-in mentality is not only bad for the people around us who will never be able to measure up; it is debilitating to us as well. It ignores the fact that we are broken and our world is broken and that both are in need of redemption. And it misses the hope that someday what is wrong will be righted and what is
38
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs