Summer camps are designed to entertain and teach children of all ages during the break from school, but summer camps also hold a large place in the lives of most college students from being either a previous camper, counselor or both.

Senior Emily Strate said she spent 10 summers as a camper at Camp Kurios in El Dorado, Ark. and attended Uplift at Harding for seven seasons. Since then she has served various positions at Camp Kurios over a span of five seasons and has been a counselor at Uplift for the last two summers.When Strate was a camper, she said she thought her counselors had their lives together and that they had all the answers. Soon after she first became a counselor, she was shocked to find out that this wasn’t true. “This was challenging because I wanted to be perfect so badly for my girls,” Strate said. “I wanted them to have a role model and mentor as good as what I had, but I had to accept that what I brought to the table was not enough and I had to trust that God would provide the wisdom these girls needed.”

Senior Briana Holland said she spent 12 years attending and counseling at Camp Barnabas, a Christian camp for handicapped children and adults in Purdy, Mo. At first, Holland said she did not want to attend Camp Barnabas, but soon into her first week she knew she would never want to miss a week.Holland served both as a volunteer counselor and a cabin staffer at Camp Barnabas. As a volunteer counselor, Holland was given a camper to take care of for the entire week. She was in charge of all the camper’s activities, daily living routines and personal enjoyment. As a cabin staffer, she was responsible for a cabin of campers and their volunteer counselors.”I love to serve others, so a camp in which I was able to serve others by working as well as loving was absolutely perfect for me,” Holland said.The special connections made at summer camp have a significant impact on the lives of the campers and counselors that typically lasts much longer than just the summer.

Graduate student Greg Lewis attended Camp Bandina in Bandera, Texas and an Easter weekend retreat called Camp Hensel in Marble Falls, Texas for five sessions. Since then, Lewis has counseled at Camp Hensel for two sessions and at Gander Brook Christian Camp for the past three summers. “For some of these kids, you are the first positive influence they have ever had in their life, the first person who has believed in their goodness, the first person their age they have seen care about their faith,” Lewis said. “It is in my summers at Gander Brook that I have seen most clearly that the abundant life Jesus promises is not just in the future, but in the now.”According to Lewis, the kids are the main reason a camp counselor has a job in the first place and the main reason he enjoyed his job as a camp counselor. Lewis said he truly saw them as ‘his kids.’Lewis said that campers and counselors alike are strongly impacted by summer camps because they provide an opportunity to escape the pressures and stresses of normal life and replace it all with concentrated time focused on building friendships and, in some settings, a closer relationship with God.