Remembering Whidbey: Part 1

A few years ago, I flew to Washington state with some friends to attend a conference. We spent a week at an old army base called Camp Casey that was located on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle. We all worked together at a Christian college outside of Chicago and we were at this conference to think about things like mentoring and spiritual formation on a college campus.

To be honest, I have never experienced anything close to the happenings on the islands off the coast of Washington. Somehow, the week on Whidbey etched itself into my life and created a more meaningful experience than I think I’ve ever had.
   
I have to admit, I am not very good at meeting new people. I much prefer the comfort of spending time with people I know to the nervousness of connecting with people I’ve never met. So initially, this conference was a bit off-putting. It was a highly relational gathering of people who seemed to, unlike me, draw energy by connecting with new people.
   
Right away, I was feeling stretched. Not only were these people new, but they were professionals in the same field I was in and so I knew that I would battle my innate tendencies to compare myself with all these people for the next 5 days. They were far more experienced, thoughtful and put together than I was.
   
Situations like this make me feel a little bit like the kid who, no matter how hard he tries, always seems to spill his lunch on his shirt and come back from the bathroom with toilet paper on his shoe. I think I spend far too much time checking my shoes for trailing toilet paper and looking for stains on my shirt. Its hard to feel comfortable with those kinds of preoccupations.
   
But, alas, here I was, and I was excited, even if it manifested itself as anxiety and intimidation. What is more, the guest speaker for the first two days seemed interesting. He was a big man with long curly hair. He was dressed like he had just gotten off a sailboat but his hands were so big it looked like he made a living hacking out canoes from tree trunks. And he was the president of a graduate school to boot. He seemed like a bit of a wild card so I was excited to see what he was all about.
   
After dinner together, he got up and began telling stories. Better stories than I had ever heard. He told us a story about how he would pick up loose change that people drop and keep it, but then offer it back in exchange for some conversation. Who does that? I liked it a lot. Then he told us about what we were going to be doing the next day. He said we would be walking through our lives and digging up all the pain and hurt and joys and delights of our past and putting it all together to see if we could make sense out of what God was doing with our lives.
   
So the anxiety was back. I had been had. He lured me in with his funny and compelling tales of bribing old ladies to talk to him on the bus and then he drops the bomb, we were going to have to be honest with each other and with ourselves about our lives. I wish I could remember looking around the room at the others there at that moment. Looking back, I sort of imagine myself begin to curl up in a ball, trying to protect myself from the inevitable process we were going to walk through together.
   
For now, though, the night was over, and I could go back to telling jokes with David and Greg, watching the waves hit the pebble covered beach, getting transfixed by the campfire, and thinking deeper thoughts than I normally do. This was a better day than most.