Grovekids’ Weblog

We were blessed to get to attend Family Camp this week at New Life Ranch. It was amazing. In fact, Elspeth said it was better than vacation. That’s a pretty good review, I’d say.

Family Camp was essentially like regular “church” camp, but you attend with your whole family. Parents attend two worship and teaching sessions per day, and kids attend age-appropriate programs during those sessions. Additionally there is time set aside each morning for families to have morning devotions.

During the afternoons and late evenings, families are encouraged to have fun together. Afternoons are unstructured free time from 1:15 until 5:30. During that time, we swam, went on a guided creek hike, rode ponies, canoed, fished and ate junk food at the canteen. Other opportunities available during that time include zip line, screamer, 2 water slides, the blob, kayaking, trail rides, basketball, skeet shooting, archery, riflery and more. During the evenings, the camp staff had wonderful things planned for us: a country fair (inflatables, pony rides, face painting, cotton candy, games, square dancing, etc), fireworks, and a talent show.

One of the best things about our time at NLR was the incredible staff. Each family who attends Family Camp is assigned a counselor. This counselor is there to serve and love your family during your stay. Counselors can help by watching a younger child while parents go do activities with their older kids or they can help you with your trays in the dining hall or they can search frantically for band-aids when your child gets blisters on her feet from being in the pool for too many hours in one day. These counselors can help you get your kids to their activities and they can even wake your kids up, get them ready for breakfast and take them to breakfast while you go on an adults only breakfast trail ride. (We didn’t take advantage of that opportunity this year, but maybe we will in the future.)

We were so blessed by our counselor, Emily. She loved on our girls, swam with them, delivered them to various activities when Brett and I were busy with other things and generally made them feel like the most special girls at camp. Emily was great!

Another highlight of our time was Tuesday evening. Parents were treated to a delicious, sit-down dinner with their choice of steak, roasted red pepper chicken or shrimp scampi (not your usual idea of camp food, huh?) while kids were treated to parties complete with pizza, s’mores and tons of fun.

If you are looking for a way to spend some quality and quantity time with your family as well as some time to refresh spiritually, I would strongly recommend NLR family camp. They will be accepting registrations for next year beginning next week. I’d love it if several families from The Grove could attend Family Camp together next year. We’d have a blast!

One last kudos to NLR: Not only was the summer staff incredible, the full time staff were amazing. We were blessed by all that they do, year-round, to make NLR a great ministry. We enjoyed hanging out with our NLR staff friends from The Grove: The Freemans, The Wests and The Harrises. Thanks guys, for ministering to us through your friendship and through all that you do through NLR.