Camping Trip

Two weekends ago I took my middle school guys' Bible Study camping. It was the last thing that our Bible Study did together as we finished our study. We have been studying John for the past 12 weeks and spent the weekend talking about making disciples. We studied the story of Gideon in Judges 6-8 throughout the weekend and had a really great time talking about how to live for God.

I don't know what it is about camping, but I love it. Once you get all set up and settled in all there is to do is sit back and enjoy the quiet. Japan is a very loud place and even though the campground is not far from the city it still felt like we were way out in the boonies. If we weren't camping in Japan I would have loved to take the rain fly off of the tent and fall asleep under the stars. (For fear of giant spiders and bugs crawling in your sleeping bag and a thunderstorm hitting in the middle of the night, you wouldn't want to camp without a tent or a rain fly.) We had some great times sitting around the fire and talking. Sitting around the fire is my favorite part of camping. It is so amazing to sit there and look at the fire and watch it burn. We found a good amount of wood for the weekend and had a great fire on Saturday night.

For those of you who don't know, bamboo is a lot of fun to put into the fire. Because there are different chambers on the piece of bamboo, at some point the bamboo is going to explode. You can hear the wood sizzle as all of the sap is being burned and then not shortly after a big explosion. We had a lot of fun this weekend and made sure to keep everyone away from the fire while the bamboo was burning. God blessed us with a beautiful weekend and a great time camping. We enjoyed hiking, playing games, shooting fingerblasters, and so much more on the trip. This is definitely one of my favorite highlights from my time here in Japan.