Look For the Sign

Look For the Sign

     by Little Leigh Douglas

 We had to learn many Bible verses “by heart” in order to qualify for free attendance at Red Rock Bible Camp. I was eight. The hundred verses (exactly a hundred, the brochure ruled) I was supposed to learn daunted me and I left it too long, of course, but finally managed, with huge trepidation, to memorize maybe half that many. I searched the Bible for the shortest ones. One of them was, “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” That was one of the longer ones.

      Jeff Wiebe played the trumpet each evening at the time that all of us were supposed to be in bed (9:00 PM) and beginning to fall asleep after devotions. He played “Eventide,” or some such song. Like vespers, I guess. I loved to hear the trumpet, tenderly blasting out so sweetly, so reassuringly, over the water, through the pines and over the Canadian Shield.

      I’m not sure if this was the camp occasion or not, because I did attend for a number of years. It may have been when I was twelve, actually, that I met a girl whom my heart really noticed, maybe the first girl that I’d had a crush on. Her name was Sandra. She seemed also to enjoy my company, the little bit of time that we had to spend in each other’s general vicinity, because there were always other young kids right there, and boys and girls having only shared a few short activities each day. 

      I was going to say when I began this thing, this memory, that I had an immediate adventure when I arrived at the lodge and cabins that made up Red Rock Bible Camp. Let me begin in Steinbach. Mom and dad dropped Jim, my older brother, and me at a church (I believe it was the EMC Mennonite church) and together with a bunch of other kids like us we climbed up (actually we were helped up because it was high) into the box of a three ton truck. From there we were driven (“herded” seems more accurate) to Hadashville and then through Rennie and Whitemouth.  Eventually, we snaked along a curvy narrow gravel highway through the lake country of the Big White Shell Forest Preserve. When we got to Red Rock everyone cheered because we’d been standing an hour and a half in a swaying vehicle.

     When I was helped off the truck box I looked around in my familiar, myopic way and, sure enough, saw a high rock to climb, right in front of me. It was about six to eight feet high and it looked to me as if, from the backside, I’d be able to get to the top. The front was straight up, with no foot or hand holds. I ascended, unfamiliar with how granite rock works and feels and how to hold on to it, because it didn’t have any grass to grab like everything did on the Prairie where I lived. I immediately fell off the front, landing on my arm. I spent my first Red Rock Bible Camp night in Whitemouth hospital, experiencing ether and nurses. By the way, the front of the rock had a big welcoming sign painted on it that said in high letters, “Jesus Saves.” Now, there’s a dilemma for a boy growing up in the Bergthaler Church in Altona, Manitoba where one assumes that those words imply the soul. I wished, looking at that sign when I got back with my cast, that they also applied to my limbs. 

     The rest of the week went by with less commotion, although everything that happened there was still a surprise to me. It was a world of swimming, canoeing, hikes to Echo Canyon, campfires, marshmallow roasts, wiener roasts, chapel every afternoon and evening (big on emotional invitations to “Take Jesus as your saviour”), meal times where we all sang “pass up the dishes where you are,” and roustabouts in the cabin where the rest of us who were mostly eightyears olds told stories (maybe; not sure), had pillow fights, sang songs, learned to adore our cabin counsellor and, of course, slept like the babies we were, every night, in the wonderful, oxygen-rich spruce-scented air of Manitoba’s Big White Shell country.