Roots

Tomorrow I'm off to Erie Beach Reunion. For as long as I can remember well into my young adulthood I did every reunion and youth camp held there. I've got all the Erie Beach thunderstorm memories and I can share tales of the "great flood" of '55 or '66 or whenever.

I went to junior high camp, then senior high camp and then was a counselor at both levels. I remember when the "old dorm" was "the new dorm." As a child in a tent, I was awakened by the deep tones of JC Stewart booming over the grounds on the very advanced PA system.

I was one of the passionate seventeen-year olds who wrote to the Regional Office about some perceived wrong done or planned for our beloved reunion grounds. Since then, as an adminstrator, I've been on the receiving end of similar pleas.

Through the years, I've been to other beloved grounds, experienced other folks' passionate connection to their roots, enjoyed the welcome of many camps and reunions. I've been considering how locked in I am to my early learnings as I'm preparing to preach at the first Sunday evening service.

No question my very early communities shaped the individual I became. Where does my identity become my own? At what point do I choose my path? As I'm thinking of my "identity and my calling" I'm wondering just how rooted am I in the individual formed and shaped and directed by those early days?

More later as I experience the 2009 Erie Beach Reunion.