Jamie's Story

    I guess I started thinking a lot more about God when I went to camp. Celebrate Me Week, 1998 (The best year to go! heehee)
     Well, until I went to camp, I didn't really understand God, and love, and friendship. It was the summer before 7th grade, I had already been in middle school for a year, but your first year they go easy on ya, so this camp was to prepare you for the years ahead, and it did prepare me.
     I went to camp thinking "I'm so glad to be out of the house. I hate my sister, I hate my mom, I hate my dad." See, the day I left, we all got into a fight, just like we always do when things get hectic.
     I was so embarrassed when I got there because they just had to announce my name on the loud speaker!
     "Jamie Kunkel has arrived!"
     I was like, "Oh gosh!".
     Well, then we played games and stuff to get to know the people that were there. And I didn't realy like it, because I was put in a cabin with no one I really knew, and it just felt weird.
     Our first day we didn't really experiance any phenomenal speech that made me think about God, but then by the second day, I was like whoa, this is so awesome! I made friends with a girl in my cabin, and my best friend was kind of angry about it. But I still kept having fun. It was so awesome. We learned little sayings like "God don't make no junk", and "If you don't like the way I look, talk to God, I just showed up." We also got told to say something nice about ourselves every once and awhile, or to say something nice about ourselves always.
     On the last day of camp, there were a lot of tears and hard goodbyes. For me, the reason I cried, was because I didn't want to go home. I would have gone anywhere but home. As soon as I got into the car with my mom, she yelled at me for crying. Everyone else's parents hugged them and welcomed them back home, and mine . . .
     Well, I was hungry, so she was nice enough to take me to McDonald's. When we were there, we ran into my best friend Anna. The two of us sat in McDonald's and talked about how awesome camp was, the people we met, the things we did, the songs we sang. We were so loud that people left because of us! Well, since we had run into Anna and her parents, I didn't have to go home, I just stayed at Anna's. The two of us had already spent pretty much every night at one or the other's house, and we spent the rest of the summer doing that also.
     Towards the end of the summer, Anna started getting sicker and sicker, and all summer she'd complained about headaches and things like that, but thought nothing of it. But soon, she started losing energy, we figured it was because we normally didn't go to bed until 4 in the morning every morning, and then woke up at noon! So we stayed at our own homes for a week, and then school started, and we just spent every weekend together.