Here are some words for our incoming campers this summer penned by third-year staffer Anna Hill.

Welcome to camp! We know your names before you come through the gates. We have prayed for you and prayed for the encounters that you will have with God this week. We have written out letters to you and placed them on your bunks. We are anxiously waiting for you on Monday morning, and with JOY we will walk with you through a week of seeking Christ through adventure.

This is the same kind of joy that accompanies us during every moment at camp. “Choose joy” was an important theme of my first summer, and that theme has been carried with me even outside of the camp gates. This joy is what we experience at the mammoth zipline, zipping right over the pond. It’s what we have on the bus, singing camp songs and playing camp games. It’s the joy we have when we are cleaning our cabin every morning to win the clean cabin award.

This is the kind of joy that we get to choose when nothing goes right. During my first summer, my cabin was tubing on the lake. The boat broke down and wouldn’t start again, and some girls didn’t get their turn on the tubes. Instead of breaking down WITH the boat, the whole cabin chose joy and jumped out into the lake. We played king of the tubes, and we had the best lake day ever.

This place up on the hill is so full of joy, and it’s full of joy because it is full of Christ. Camp Highland has a high ropes course, and a drop zone, and zip lines. These things have purpose, and that is to use high adventure and friendship to further our relationship with our God. We can’t wait for you to get here, and we can’t wait to take a hike with you down to the pond or to the overlook. We can’t wait to walk alongside you into the abundant joy that God has for us all this week.