Before I begin, I just decided to look over my last blog post about this subject (here, for my trip in 2013) just to see what all I said about it. Honestly, while there is content in that post, it's really a whole bunch of nothing/not all of it is on-topic. To summarise what all happened, members of different InterVarsity Chapters from the Southwest (more specifically, Arizona [University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and maybe Northern Arizona University], New Mexico [New Mexico State University and New Mexico Tech... I think], and a couple of colleges/universities from California) all came to Campus By the Sea in order to study the Bible. In my case, some members of my chapter that had never gone to Chapter Camp before, for different reasons, were studying the first half of the Book of Mark in a manuscript form. That basically means that we were all given the Book of Mark in loose-leaf form, broken down by page and line number (there's no Mark Chapter 2, Verse 3, for example, but Page 12, Lines 16-20), with us studying each portion during different sessions, coming up with questions for them, and doing our best to answer them through what we've just read beforehand in the manuscript and in the Old Testament (and through the aid of Bible Dictionaries and such, if need be). We were not intended to use our preconceived notions of the Bible to answer them, but try to go at it from a more-or-less fresh start. Of course, we all more or less knew what all would happen, but it was more of a way to prevent any "Oh, our church teaches it this way..."/"Oh, I've always been taught that such-and-such meant..." kind of deals. Now, that's not to say that's all of what we did--we had plenty of breaks to keep from going too crazy; were free to play, hike around, and enjoy ourselves when time allotted (and even go on a trip to the nearby town of Avalon); and we were encouraged to have constructive fun with our sessions.
For this trip (March 15-21), things were more or less the same. I knew what to expect--the trip to Tucson to the camp, the general routine of the time there, how we'd be studying... The first relevant change was that, now, I would be studying with InterVarsity members from other campuses (the previous Mark 1 students now numbered 4, for different reasons, and that seemed the situation for the New Mexico students). Secondly, going in, there was initially one thing already weighing on my mind.
The hashtag #ICanHasFaith derives from an exercise we all did (sort of a way for us to get to know one another)--using a piece of coloured construction paper, cut-outs from various magazines, and our own imagination, we made a picture of the two sides of ourselves: what people usually see in us at first glance, and who we really are. For me, "First Glance" was mostly A Face In the Crowd, and me twisting a phrase from the movie "Men In Black"--"Anonymity is his name; silence, his native tongue"; almost fittingly enough, no one else picked up on the reference. The other side, aside from tidbits about myself that I could find/had the presence of mind to just write on it was that hashtag (I would've gone for a LOLCats parody of I Can Has Cheezburger, but I found no picture of a cat and my drawing skills aren't that great, so I went for the next best thing). During the Small Group before Ash Wednesday, the members of our Small Group were given the task of giving something up for Lent. I chose Doubt; I don't know how well that's been going, but it's good as a reminder not to be so skeptical. The Thursday before, God put on my heart something that's been plaguing me since before I moved to Arizona (I had to have been around 8 at least). From the moment I understood the basics of Christianity, aside from a period between the ages of 17 and 20, I've always been a Christian, in the sense that I believed in God, that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, and all of the other basic tenets of the faith. The problem was the idea of faith. Even at that age, I wasn't always satisfied with just believing. There had to be something solid behind it that I could perceive. Things were/seemed manageable until the age of 17. By that point, what remained of my relationship with God became so distant I was trusting more in philosophies that made more sense to me that I was molding into my own personal faith than what the Bible was saying. Thankfully, things between God and I were patched and my relationship with him is stronger than it was before, but my willingness to give areas of my life up to Him is still not where it should be. As a symbolic act, we all placed a nickel in a cup, reminiscent of the poor widow who gave up her two coins (basically, all she had to give) for the Temple renovation/upkeep. As with the coin, there was another side to it: faith that this symbolic act both had real actual power behind it and that wasn't for nothing. That I wasn't just tossing it into the cup with the hope that things will change, only for the same issue to be cropping up next year.
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