Bekah is stylin’ some Sonlight gear!

News from Sonlight:  Camps are filling and full. We would suggest registering sooner rather than later if you want to be sure of a spot for summer 2012. Heather is busy with staff hiring, we’re going to have a rock star staff! Other news from camp involves a water project- pumping water up to the tanks, which involved lots of hose being strung thru the forest. Josh Liles stopped by, thanks Josh for your help!

“Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.” -Stephen Leacock

-Katie Mac

Kids need places to roam. Places for unstructured interaction. A recent New York Times article about Danah Boyd’s research gives fresh perspective on  teenagers, social media and their online lives.

Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place off line. “Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed,” Dr. Boyd said . “Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now”. Dr. Boyd, a  senior researcher at Microsoft, an assistant professor at New York University and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard — is a widely respected figure in social media research.

The internet is a place where kids can hang out. For kids of all backgrounds and dispositions,  troubled teenagers and model youth alike, adolescent online behavior is a reflection of what teenagers’ social lives have always been: friendship, gossip, flirting, transgressing and keeping it all — good and bad — from parents. Research shows that what is taking place online is an extension of what is in their lives. There are bad things in kids lives, and the internet is not a shelter from those bad things – but it is not the cause of those bad things either. Dr. Boyd is an advocate of kids. Her research demonstrates that youth are using the internet in productive ways.  The world wide web is empowering them to take positive action in ways never available to their parents.

Allowing kids to be kids. To find support in a community, to make a difference in our world, to hang out with friends – maybe the internet is not such a threatening place after all, but rather a place where teenagers are behaving exactly as they always have behaved.

A power outage took Sonlight off the grid for 10 hours last night. We were thankful for:

• Worship by candlelight
• The quiet, when compressors and devices are silent
• Conversation and card games by the woodstove
• The utility crew who spent 10 hours in a storm, out all night to restore power by 7 am this morning
• Kids and leadership staff who find joy in the unexpected
• Fresh snow on the meadow and the peaks this morning
• A reminder of the only true source of power, which never goes out

Wintry again! It’s snowing hard at Sonlight on a Saturday afternoon. Youth from St. John’s in Santa Fe are enjoying the fresh snow for their ski trip weekend. Nice to see snow in the air and have powder for snow shoeing again.

Preparing for Summer 2012 = busy people at camp! Registration, web design, talking to staff… we’re getting ready!

Don’t worry, Topé and Keiko are hard at work napping to save all of their energy for the summer.

‎”Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, ‘you owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. it lights the whole sky.”

(Thanks Kelsey Mac for the quote!)

There is so much noise all around us! Television, music, Facebook, shopping malls, cell phones, texting, Tweeting, email… today’s techno-world continually plays this background soundtrack in our lives. The latest headline, the newest hit single, the most recent trending topic – all of these bits of information can sometimes anesthetize us to the most miraculous story of all: that the Almighty God who created our universe loves us. He loves us so much that He sent His only son to be the ultimate sacrifice.

Is your soul numb to this miracle? Remember camp. Remember the beauty and stillness of His Creation.

Escape the noise.

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

-Heather

Don’t miss out on one WILD summer!

Registration is now open for Summer 2012!

Look for the online registration link on the Sonlight homepage