By Ella Sams – Broadcasting Staff
Every day I have the same routine. Wake up, eat breakfast, take a shower, go to school praying that my next class will approach soon, never taking my eyes off the clock until school’s over. Then I go home, do my homework, and prepare for another painfully repetitive day.
Each day seems slow, but when I look back I see the amount of time that slipped between my fingers faster than I could react.
Windy Gap, an annual camp run by Younglife, works to make sure we refrain from running through life at 90 mph and take a breath of fresh air.
Every year, Younglife holds a camp on Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend at a place called Windy Gap in North Carolina. High schoolers from all over the Athens area united for three days of singing, laughing, and bonding. After abandoning our electronics in the bus, the frigid weather drew a new awareness to life. I stopped for a minute under the falling snow and recognized a new sound that I had come to forget… my heartbeat.
My heartbeat was synchronized with the sound of wind rushing through the bare trees, the waves of the music in my bloodstream, the distant laughs and the ambient noise of snow falling into the cold creek water. As a Georgian, seeing snow falling from the sky was quite foreign to me.
Each morning and night we were brought together with hours of passionate singing and dancing wrapped up with a meaningful sermon from Rev. David Page. We were left feeling like our minds had just completed a triathlon. He connected to his listeners as if to say “I understand you completely, but here’s the truth”. As his talk progressed, our eyes became wider and wider and our bodies leaning in more and more.
I looked around the room and it dawned on me why my experience was so unique. We were one group. We were patches of the quiet, the lonely, the loving, the hopeless, the lost, the regretful, and the incomplete all sewn together into one big quilt. We all had abandoned our bitterness toward others and were holding hands with tears slipping down our cheeks.
We were awakened to a new perspective on life. For once I wasn’t preoccupied with worrying about the step ahead. I was focused on the now. I, along with everyone else had become a new person. We were given strength we never knew we had. With that strength we can now go through the day making it worth remembrance.
