SunSenior High 1 this year was thrilling, fulfilling, stressful, and tiring.

It was a great week, yet again. Unfortunately, we lost our administrative director just before the week started, leaving me to serve as the program coordinator and part of the administrative director all at the same time. In addition, we were without a music leader until Tuesday, so I did that too. It was a little stressful, but once we got going, I was honestly a little disappointed that I was going to be giving up the music. It had been a long time since I had a reason to play the guitar. By Monday night, I remembered how much I liked being a worship leader. I'm not overly skilled with a guitar, but I can lead songs.

We had a great group of counselors this year. And a lot of returning campers. It was by far the most balanced group agewise that I can remember in a long time.

Sunday night is the least programmed night of the week, due to the fact that it's the start of the camp, and we need to take care of some business, and do some icebreakers and games. We used Death Cab for Cutie's I Will Possess Your Heart as the background for a dramatization of the busyness of teenage life to introduce the theme. It's about a girl, but the lyrics work great as being spoken by Jesus too. We started the music and cued up some iPhones to ring during the first minute or two, having people carry on a short conversation with an imaginary person on the other end. The rest of the dramatization was involved with all the distractions that we face, while on screen, I had scenes from Koyaanisqatsi playing.

Side note: John Hayes gave me a copy of Koyaanisqatsi last year. He played about 10 seconds of it. I said thanks, and that was it. Saturday night before camp, I was sitting and thinking about what to put on screen to illustrate the pace of our lives. I remembered that video, but all I saw was a silent clip of some cities. Thinking that it was worth a shot, I popped it in. It's an absolutely gorgeous movie. It's like visual crack. I was mesmerized. I couldn't quit watching it. It's a 1983 flim consisting of time-lapse and slow-motion footage from across the United States, set to music. The word Koyaanisqatsi means 'crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living', and the film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way. It's available from Netflix (as a DVD and as a Watch Now) and is part of a trilogy of films.

The whole point of the evening is to introduce the theme: Listen! God is Calling. The key point we were trying to make was that we aren't usually even listening. I thought about reusing Nooma - Noise, but we did that just a couple of years ago.

We also introduced the concept of selah from the Psalms. A selah is a liturgical note in the Psalms that is a cue to stop and let the weight of the moment settle in. We used it several times throughout the week.

Dave Barnhart from Trinity in Homewood was our speaker and he was great all week at complimenting and setting up things for the program.