A guest post by Kyle Roskamp, Young Life leader from the Grand Rapids SouthWest area.
Whoever invented Wilderness Ranch is stupid. But also amazing.
That might be a difficult phenomenon to process, but if you’ve ever watched JR Smith play basketball or listened to the new Justin Bieber songs, you know what I’m talking about. Some things are just amazing and stupid at the same time.
How can Wilderness Ranch even happen?
Logistically, how can 15 people survive together in the woods for five days? I mean, it took the settlers at Jamestown about 19 seconds before they were like, “Wow, sleeping outside isn’t awesome, let’s build a legitimate shelter really quick because there are things like bears and gnats and cougars outside and not dying sounds very fun.” How am I, an embracer of the 21st Century, supposed to deal with such travesties as no toilet paper, no clocks and no 4G LTE wireless data? How can I trust myself to clean my own water, cook my own meals and traverse a landscape whose price for tomfoolery is a 5,000 foot drop to my death?
Emotionally, how can it happen? I’m an experienced attender of slumber parties, and one thing I’ve learned is that after spending ten hours straight with someone, things get weird and tempers get short. How was I supposed to spend a week with these people, while trying to have positive interactions with them while climbing a 14,000 ft. mountain in a state of constant hunger and exhaustion? How can you possibly have room for Jesus when all you can think about is eating another coconut Clif bar?
But it happened.
I can only compare waking up on the first morning of Wilderness to the first time I heard Call Me Maybe by Carley Rae Jepsen on the radio. Transcendent moments are usually retrospective. The gravity of significant moments is usually lost until those moments are gone. Their absence creates a gap, and the desire to fill that gap is what truly makes these moments beautiful in hindsight. However, once in awhile you fully understand the significance of a moment while you’re experiencing it and in the midst of it, you understand what that moment means to you now, and what it will mean in the future.
When I poked my head out from under that tarp on the first morning in the woods—much like when I heard Carley Rae belt that hook for the first time in the Spring of 2012—I knew it. This moment was something special. This week was going to go triple-platinum.
Did it ever.
Wonderful things can happen when you take distractions out of the equation. Having to look nine people in the face for an entire week while they laugh and bleed and cry and struggle and sweat is something special. These nine people, stripped of everything they usually hold dear, were left with the most raw, unencumbered versions of themselves. There’s nothing else like it.
I used to think Jesus was far away. I used to think “being the face of Christ” was a cliché metaphor that just meant I was supposed to be nice to people. But I’m wrong.
Asking me about my favorite time I saw the face of Christ on the trail is like asking me about my favorite star in the night sky because there is an endless amount of perfect, beautiful stars.
I saw the face of Christ sixty-five thousand times in the mountains. And the face of Christ is the best:
It’s Tony and Connor passing out Crystal Light packets. It’s Jake telling the same stupid Magic Owl joke over and over. It’s Katelyn and Erin pulling each other to the top of the mountain when they’re both about to puke.
It’s waking up and making the classic “OH MY GOSH I MISSED YOU GUYS SO MUCH” joke to your friends because you’ve seen them every second for the last four days. But then you realize you actually did miss them, because the moments you spent in your dreams with your heads eight inches from each other are moments you didn’t get to spend together.
It’s eating breakfast under a sky that you thought couldn’t possibly be painted that blue.
It’s incredible what loving nine seemingly random people can do to you.
It makes you say things out loud that you haven’t told anyone but your pillow.
It makes you hope things for them that they haven’t even considered for themselves.
It makes sitting in the back of a bus for 29 hours listening to Taylor Swift songs seem like the best party in the history of western civilization.
We did a lot of cool stuff. We climbed around a waterfall for lunch, we climbed across a knife’s edge, we peaked a 14,000 ft mountain. Those things were awesome. But those things really don’t matter to me.
What matters to me is the people. It’s seeing the way we are all consistently blind-sided by the Holy Spirit and the work He does in our lives. It’s developing authentic relationships—beyond the photo edits, the subtext of social media posts, the outfits, the pressure of the universe. People who show me everyday why I love Jesus so much. All because of those stupid mountains.
Nine of my 15 best friends are teenagers now, which is weird because I’m a 23-year-old dude about to graduate college. But, whatever.
I know it’s probably strange, the love I have for those nine weirdos. When you get back into places that have running water and wi-fi and toilets, it gets complicated. In the real world, I have much less in common with those kids than I did in the forest.
But it doesn’t matter. Because every time I see these clowns for the rest of eternity, after a minute and a half of awkward silence, we remember. We remember that we don’t have a ton in common, but we do have in common the only thing that really matters.
Jesus had some of those people. People who loved and cared for each other regardless of circumstances. People whose only goal was to make each other the best version of themselves, a version that served the Lord, served other people and brought joy to everyone they met.
Jesus had 12.
I have nine.
That’s more than enough.
