Dream Job

Throughout the course of my life I have, like most people, had several dream jobs. As a kid I wanted to be a cowboy. You know, own a horse, ride it around, and do cool stuff like her cattle. As I grew up it kept changing. I wanted to run a floral shop with a green house attached. I wanted to open up a coffee shop. For a while, I had this idea to open up a restauraunt turned jazz club at night, coffee house during the day. I have always wanted to teach high school English and be a cross-country coach, and that may end up being what I do. But the most surprising one was for a short time I wanted to be a ballerina. Just kidding. Ibe do like to dance, but no tights for me, and I could never do that.

The most recent one and perhaps my favorite dream job is to run a camp. Buy some land, a lot of it, 100 acres or more, in the prairie somewhere, or up north, someplace surrounded by wilderness. It would have to be near a lake and/or a mountain, anywhere that you can look around and not see anybody for miles. The camp I went to as a kid had a beautiful lake, two of them actually, surrounded by woods and cabins and teepees. I actually lived in a teepee for a summer as a camp counselor. It was the best thing I have done. We taught kids, we affected their lives, we made their lives better. All our time was spent outdoors, we cooked outdoors, we ate outside, every night we had fires and talked about what we had learned that day.

I want my camp to be targeted towards troubled young men, disappointed older men, and boys who were never taught to be men. Guys who seek more than the status quo of what society says men ought to be. I want to help kids who have never had a chance or an opportunity to be a man - juvenile delinquents, orphans, or just kids who grew up with no one helping them out. Guys need a chance to live with passion and express the deep emotions that every man needs to know and appreciate. They need to know what God intended when He made them in His image. God is not a meek or well-mannered individual with a part in His hair, and a quiet disposition. God is a mighty force, a warrior, and the creator of love and passion.

A man must love deeply and experience real fear and respond to it, deal with it, to know what it means to be a man. Someone needs to tell a boy that it is okay to be feel fear, to feel love, so that he can know how to deal with it. The phrase "Be a man" is thrown around so flippantly with negative connotations, but truthfully most boys never are taught how to be a man in many situations. My dream job is to have a place to give boys that chance, to give them guidance. And for other men who are grown to get the chance they never got.

There is an opportunity to raise the next generation of men to be just that - men. Not confused boys, who wake up one day at 30 and realize that for some time they have been labeled a man, but not really knowing what that means. Today's men are not given the initation and induction into manhood that they need in order to know their role. Plus it would be cool to work in the woods with a bunch of guys who want to live wild.

I received that, and I am extremely grateful for it. But I know that I am the lucky minority. I was raised by an amazing man, my father, and grew up in the church with men of character and integrity who taught me by example how to be a man. I am not saying that I am the "man", but rather that I was given the opportunity to grow into manhood. An ongoing process, but a process that has to start somewhere. And hopefully, I want my camp to do that. I know that a few of my friends share my vision, and I pray that someday it will come to fruititon.