Blog this

I learned this week that a good friend of mine in Wisconsin, Gary Cleveland, has entered the blogosphere, and I'm adding a link to his blog in my links list. I encourage you to check it out.

Seems like Gary and I have been friends forever, but our relationship dates back only about a dozen years or so. At the time, he was directing the senior camp session at Wisconsin Christian Youth Camp, and I was putting down roots in Oklahoma City after graduating from OC a few years earlier. I was a camper at WCYC in high school when my family lived there, and counseled for a couple of years while in college. But when it came time to work for a living, with limited vacation time that you had to actually earn before you got it, it had been a few years since I'd been to camp.

The more I talk to folks associated with other Christian camps, the more I come to appreciate WCYC and often find myself in awe of what takes place there. Unlike most Christian youth camps, we offer a two-week session per age group. Many just offer a week. And unlike many camps, our staffs are 100 percent volunteer. From the director on down to the college kid scraping trays and running the dishwasher in the dining hall, no one gets a dime. That way, overhead is lower so more campers can afford the experience. I always get a kick out of seeing the looks on the faces of counselors at other camps when they find out we do what we do for nothing, while they're getting paid for their work, even if it isn't a whole lot of money.

The remarkable thing to me is that it takes a staff of about 25 to pull off a two-week camp session for 90-110 kids. Most of our staff work both weeks. You'd think that if you're asking someone to give you two weeks of their life for no money, you'd have a hard time filling up a staff. And yet most years I'm told we have to turn away some folks who want to be on staff because we simply don't have roles for them to fill or beds for them to sleep in.

I don't know if way back in the early 90s Gary Cleveland had to turn someone else away -- maybe someone he already knew and trusted -- to take a chance on some guy from Oklahoma whom he'd never met before. But because of that opportunity he gave me, some of my most cherished friends on earth are the folks who give themselves selflessly to that effort every year. It's hard for me to imagine who or what might be filling the void in my life had those relationships never happened. I'm not sure even Gary understands the significance of that gift -- that opportunity -- that he gave me.

At any rate, I encourage you to check out his blog, South Moon.

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If you like gospel music and if instrumental accompaniment isn't a Heaven or Hell issue for you, I highly recommend Randy Travis' Glory Train, released this week.

I'll be seeing Travis in concert this weekend at Crossings Community Church, where he'll perform an inspirational concert -- as opposed to a country concert -- drawing largely from this new CD. On some of his other gospel CDs, like Rise and Shine, Travis sing songs with Christian themes. Most of them are good songs, but not necessarily songs you've heard before. On Glory Train, you get a good number of traditional and folk gospel songs you already know and love, like Were You There, Precious Memories, Are You Washed in the Blood, Precious Lord, Take My Hand, Nothing But the Blood and He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. In other words, songs you can sing along with the first time you spin the disk. I knew from the first listen that 13 of the 19 tracks from Glory Train were going to be transferred to my DellPod.

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My stat counter service tells me that someone in Slovakia loaded wysiwyg on Tuesday. Twice. Cool.