Note: This month’s theme is “Back to Basics” and we thought it would be great to reinvite Steve to guest blog for us again. Steve and Susie are owners and summer camp directors who firmly believe the in the value that camp can bring into a young person’s life.

Having an extensive background in growing up attending camp, Steve knows many first-time camper’s fear of trekking into new territory, with unknown strangers, and (possibly the scariest of it all) a foreign experience without parents by one’s side. It was through one camp counselor’s interaction with Steve that his view of himself and confidence in himself changed for a lifetime. The powerful impact of camp includes the gifts of being able to build interpersonal, conceptualization and character skills among peers. Camp has also helped so many connect, collaborate and build tenacity within young adolescents in a safe and exciting space away from media and technology.

“Do not be conformed to this world,but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2).

This world is filled with distractions. Every good and perfect gift comes from the Lord, but even those good gifts can become obstructions in our path to growing more intimate with Jesus. We are too busy to discern what the will of God is because we are preoccupied with the latest Facebook updates about so and so’s trip to wherever and what so and so ate for lunch.

So, how are we supposed to transform our minds when aside from social media, there are hundreds of other distractions that do not help us focus on kingdom-minded living? We need to go back to the basics. Transformation comes later, but begins from the steady, daily renewal of our minds and hearts. This starts with sitting at the feet of Jesus soaking in His presence, meditating on His Word night and day, and listening to His voice as we lift up our praises and humble requests for his help. Which of these basics do you want to revisit this month?

– FEBC-Korea in LA Staff

My wife Susie and I are summer camp directors and we deeply love what we do.   We know that we impact hundreds of children every year, helping them become more confident and competent than they would otherwise be.  When we see adults who were once campers with us, we see people who are committed parents, spouses and leaders in their communities.

I recently served on the national board of the American Camp Association and a fellow board member presented me this simple question: what is the greatest gift of camp? This is no easy question.  Camp is a place for joyous fun and fabulous friendships.  Campers learn to love nature and often feel a greater connection to the Almighty.

But I believe the greatest gift is a somewhat ironic one: camp is a tech-free environment that prepares people to thrive in our tech-centric modern world.

It only took me over 20 years to answer that question. In fact, you could even say that it took me over 40 years.  To make this point, allow me to share again my first summer camp experience.

In 1972, my parents sent me to summer camp for 5 weeks.  I was only 8 and I did not want to go.  I was experiencing a crisis of confidence and was certain that I did not have the “goods” to survive without my parents. My confidence crisis came from the fact that I was not “Mighty Mouse”.  This requires an explanation.

My older brother (10 years my senior) was the All-District center on the football team. In West Texas, home of “Friday Night Lights”, this was the gold standard. My brother was undersized and often blocked people substantially heavier than he, earning the nickname “Mighty Mouse”. In fact, the winning homecoming float was a 16-foot paper mache Mighty Mouse wearing his jersey. This was wonderful for him, but a challenge for me.

I was a chronic asthmatic who was allergic to Bermuda grass. My efforts to play were met with asthma attacks. That was not a problem. The problem was the fact that other people looked at me as if I would never measure up to my brother. I wondered about my own self worth. Sure, my parents told me it did not matter, but that was not comforting. It was their job to make me feel better, so their encouragement felt hollow. That summer they sent me to camp. I did not want to go and arrived terrified. I was among the last to arrive and walked in like I was approaching a firing line.

What happened next was among the most important moments of my life.

A young man aged 19 or 20 walked up to me, knelt down to make sure he made direct eye contact, and started to talk.You must be Steve. I’m Bill. Wow, I have been waiting all day for you to get here. In fact, the rest of the guys are back in the cabin and they have been dying to meet you. Come on, buddy – let’s go play!!” For the next 5 weeks, every interaction I had with Bill had a simple message embedded in it – his life was made richer because this asthmatic 8 year-old had been part of it. I went home confident that I was spectacular. OK, I could not play football (I would soon adopt tennis instead), but an awesome role model had decided I was special. I never looked back.

When Bill knelt down, he had no idea what he had done for me. I suspect that he has not thought about me in over 40 years.

Yet had he not connected with me, I would certainly not have eventually become a camp director or had the opportunity to work with thousands of families over the past two decades. He instilled in me a deep love of the power of summer camp.  I would return for 11 summers.  I then spent 8 years in the “real world” of finance and consulting, but I returned in 1993 to start a camp of my own.  Ever since then, I have struggled to understand and explain why camp had such a powerful impact on me and on the children I work with.

 

In the recent years, education and youth development research has made discoveries that help explain this powerful impact.  The material includes studies by the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills and the research described in Paul Tough’s “How Children Succeed”.  A common theme throughout all of this work is the importance of “non-cognitive skills”. It turns out that “non-cognitive skills” are critical to success in college and beyond.  Our conventional education system has traditionally focused on cognitive skills (math, reading, science) while essentially ignoring the “softer” non-cognitive skills.    They are harder to measure, so they are also less likely to be managed.  Yet we are now learning that they are the key to rebounding from challenges, interacting with other people and finding meaning in life.

They are also a love letter to summer camps –great camps focus on teaching the very skills that we now know are critically important.

In fact, this research has convinced me that camps are even more relevant than I had previously thought.

As I read the material, the non-cognitive skills seem to fall into three buckets:

• Interpersonal skills. This bucket includes oral communication, collaboration, conflict resolution and leadership.  These face-to-face skills erode as our children spend less time in free play and more time interacting with electronic screens.

• Conceptualization skills. This bucket includes creativity and critical thinking.  By critical thinking, the experts do not mean the acumen to solve a math proof, but instead the ability to synthesize different (often unrelated) concepts and develop new answers.

• Character skills. This bucket includes attributes like grit, curiosity, initiative, and zest.

Certainly academic success is important, but most everyone else focuses on academic skills.  The skills listed above are under-emphasized but no less important. In fact, these are the very skills that make anyone a better parent, spouse, employee, entrepreneur or church leader. But what does camp have to do with that? It is because all skills require practice.  Oral communication, collaboration, leadership and resilience are all skills.

But when we replace face-to-face time with screen-to-screen time, we stop practicing the skills that enable us to connect.   The ability to communicate orally is a skill that requires more than a mastery of words, but also the ability to read body language, hear intonations and “feel” others emotions.  Collaboration is also a skill, as is leadership. Even resilience is a skill.  I want my campers (and my own children) to be comfortable with failure as see it as a teacher.  I then want them to have the knowledge that continued effort and tenacity can help them overcome failure.  How can they learn that if they never experience it?

In camp, we have no technology to distract us.  We offer many activities so every camper can experience easy successes as well as temporary setbacks.  And, perhaps most importantly, we surround the campers with young adults who model the skills and behaviors that the children need to learn.  We help them become better teammates, leaders, partners and servants. So while I love the laughter and joy and friendship of camp, I most love knowing that we are sending young people into the world that needs their heart and their skills. I love knowing we have helped prepare them to be successful, and content, citizens. As our own children are preparing to go to college, I know they are ready to be successful citizens.

Learn more about our Guest Blog Contributor, Steve Baskin:

Steve Baskin owns and operates Camp Champions with his wife Susie.  A graduate of Harvard Business School, Steve left investment banking to pursue a career that would positively impact children.  He is an advocate for “camp education” (using camp to foster the skills that lead to a full and successful life) and has served on the board of the American Camp Association, speaks frequently (including a TEDx talk) and writes for Psychology Today.   To learn more about Camp Champions, please visit http://blog.campchampions.com.

 

Note: This month’s theme is “God’s Calling on Your Life” and we thought it would be great to invite Steve to guest blog for us. Steve, Susie and their children are world travelers. Steve shares his personal thoughts about the greatest gift that comes from travelling and how travelling influenced the way he and his wife Susie have raised their children.

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).

Both Steve and Susie have made it one of their highest priorities to teach their children how to face challenges. Teaching and training opportunities like none other occurred during their family travels.  As Steve reveals,  during travel “these uncomfortable accommodations, odd edibles, difficult transportation and challenging moments all made them stronger, more confident and more capable.” They earnestly believe that their role as parents is to encourage their children to boldly live and thrive. As Christians, we believe that carrying out God’s calling in our own lives– in whatever we are doing, in whatever career we are in and whatever season we are experiencing– is a lifetime’s journey worth striving for and especially in a manner that will bring God honor and glory forevermore.

We are so grateful to be friends with Steve and Susie and it is truly an honor to have them share a piece of their travelling stories with us.

– FEBC-Korea in LA Staff

 

My wife and I have twice embarked on trips that have seemed almost insane: two 6-month trips with our four children. The first trip was 5 years ago when our twin sons were 14 and our daughters were 13 and 10.  We are on the second trip now.  These journeys have been low budget, high excitement affairs that will eventually take us to roughly 30 countries and 6 continents.

What is the greatest gift of travel?

When I think about the gifts of travel, so many ideas come to mind.  My mind first goes to the unusual experiences we have had: interacting with tigers, observing gorillas in their jungle habitat or hunting with an indigenous Tanzanian tribe.  We spent two hours with a great-grandmother in Vietnam who shared the story of her life and even proudly showed us the funeral blanket that her family had woven for her in preparation for her death and in celebration of her long and wonderful life.

 

I believe that almost nothing important happens in a minute, but everything of worth happens in moments.  These moments and others like them have adorned our lives like pieces of art on a wall.

But none of these moments are the greatest gift of travel.

Perhaps the greatest gift is the discovery and appreciation of beauty, both natural and man-made.  I asked our four children about their favorites visual memories.  Several mentioned a sunrise at the Himalayas and a sunset at the cliffs at the Cape of Good Hope.  They also raved about the architecture of Barcelona in general and the Sagrada Familia in particular.  They described the vastness of the Serengeti and the starkness of a glacier.  The Summer Palace made a big impression, as did the gardens of the Alhambra.  Personally, I love art and have some of my finest memories in the great museums.

While these visual memories provide me joy, I realize that they are not the greatest gift of travel either.

 

A third thought came to mind.  Our family travels have helped us bond as a familial unit.  When we travel, we do so in a highly spartan manner.  We are unplugged, without phones, GPS or the internet except for the end of each day to check emails.  We travel with backpacks and stay in hostels.  For example, the six of us are currently all staying in a 220 square foot room in Tokyo in 3 beds.  Being unplugged and uncomfortable creates opportunities for shared experiences and authentic conversation.

Susie and I like to say that by traveling, our family goes far so that we can become close. Our family is our greatest source of joy, so the opportunity to share, suffer, grow and explore together is precious to us.

But I realized that there is an even greater gift of travel.

After much thought, I have determined that the greatest gift is the resourcefulness and resilience that it fosters in our children.  As much as Susie and I love our time with our children, our ultimate goal is to prepare them to be successful without us.  We want them to be capable, caring and contributing adults.

As a child, my parents had a mantra whenever I would encounter a challenge: “the solution to your problem is in this room.”  Sometimes the solution was a simple physical one.   Perhaps I would need to loosen a screw and end up using a dime when no screwdriver was available.  But the more profound lesson was that my previous experiences and my disposition would enable me to access answers that were not immediately available.  The solution to a challenge might require critical thinking, creativity, asking for help or accepting an outcome that was not my personal preference.

This belief that I was both resourceful and resilient provided me with a personal narrative that helped transform problems into opportunities.  With this narrative, I have found life to be an adventure and not a burden.  I married a woman who shares this approach to life.

We both want this for our children.

To do this, we have tried to allow them to make mistakes and solve their own problems.  But this is not easy.  As a parent, it is difficult to watch your children struggle and experience discomfort if we can alleviate it, even when we know that doing so will help them grow.  We love them and we want them to be happy.

Helping children become more resilient and resourceful is one of the reasons that we love being summer camp directors.  Children who attend our camp will experience great joy, but they also experience much more.  Underneath the surface of the fun, something important is happening.   They are learning ways to resolve conflict, overcome failure (few people learn to waterski on their first try) and develop self control.  For our own children, we have sent them to other camps as well as our own, so that they will have the true away-from-home experience and learn that they can learn to rely on themselves.

If I could give one single gift to a child, it would be the belief that they can not only survive, but also thrive in difficult situations.

We cannot protect our children from challenges or difficulties.  OK, perhaps we can protect them while they are children.  But we certainly cannot protect them from the challenges they will experience as adults.  They will encounter difficult relationships, failures, lost jobs and lost loved ones.

So if we cannot prevent them from facing these challenges, we must prepare them to face them.

As I mention above, our travel style in unusual.  The kids call it adventure travel rather than holiday travel.  We eat street food and make our selections by pointing.  Often, we have no idea what we are eating.   Our epicurean experiences have included exotic vegetables, a fruit that smelled like rotting meat, dozens of creatures from the sea and “delicacies” that I will spare the details of.  [Note: I believe the word “delicacy” translates into “stuff only local people would ever eat”.

 

We walk and take public transportation, including a “sleeper bus” in China with 5-foot bunks and no bathroom.   We do not use tour guides and sometimes have to improvise our travel plans.  We strive to live like the locals in the countries we visit.

On a few occasions, we became separated from each other and needed to keep our heads to reconnect.  One such occasion was in Versailles and another in Hong Kong.  We had discussed the possibility of separation and had a plan if it happened.  When it did, everyone remained calm and executed the plan.

These uncomfortable accommodations, odd edibles, difficult transportation and challenging moments all made them stronger, more confident and more capable.

And, like camp, the overall experience is so fun and rewarding that the challenges are essentially hidden and are easier to absorb.

Susie and I share the philosophy that our job is to make ourselves obsolete.  We want to be loved, but we do not want to be needed when they are grown.  Next fall, our three oldest will go to college.  Susie and I will miss them terribly.  But we know that they will be OK.  In fact, we know more than that, we know that they will thrive.

That is truly a great gift.

Learn more about our Guest Blog Contributor, Steve Baskin:

Steve Baskin owns and operates Camp Champions with his wife Susie.  A graduate of Harvard Business School, Steve left investment banking to pursue a career that would positively impact children.  He is an advocate for “camp education” (using camp to foster the skills that lead to a full and successful life) and has served on the board of the American Camp Association, speaks frequently (including a TEDx talk) and writes for Psychology Today.   To learn more about Camp Champions, please visit http://blog.campchampions.com.

  A lot can be learned from this. She was doing more work for Christ at a job that was not even church related. This poses another point: People outside the church need to be fed, too. If we remain in our bubbles of Christian communities, who is going to reach the people on the outside?

Truett Cathy started a small restaurant business in 1946. He was a hard worker and developed a unique way to make chicken, coining the famous Chick-fil-A sandwich in 1963. However, Cathy did something that most businesses didn’t: his restaurant only operated 6 days a week. During the recession, Cathy’s business struggled, as most others did. Research also showed him that if he were to open on Sundays, it would add at least 16 percent to revenues. However, Cathy chose not to and God blessed him because of it. Chick-fil-A today makes more than $5 billion a year in sales, and they still do not open on Sunday. Chick-fil-A witnessed to the world with their practices. The way Truett Cathy trusted God with his business sets an example for businesses today. Who would have thought that you could set an example for Christ by selling chicken sandwiches? This proves that just because your business doesn’t sell Bibles does not mean you can be a witness. (Information in this paragraph found in Management by Proverbs by Michael Zigarelli)

            In a video titled “Work as Worship”  by RightNow Ministries, it explains how even working is a way of worshiping God. “He gave us skill, he gave us passion, and he gave us work,” the narrator says. “When we do our jobs with excellence, integrity and diligence, it’s an act of worship. We are displaying God’s craftsmanship to the non-believing world around us.” Therefore, remember when choosing a career path that it is not so much what profession you have, as it is how you work in this job. If you are working with excellence, integrity and diligence, you are in fact worshiping your Creator.

Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.

Proverbs 16:3

In this video he proclaimed that everyone worships something, whether or not you believe in God. For many of us, we worship ourselves. Our motives, comfort and pleasure come before anything else. I would seriously encourage you to watch this video and reflect on what it is that is keeping you from putting God first. Bethke concludes this video by saying, “Before I leave, I’ll leave you with this: What of those other things took nails in their wrists? Or how about the last time money or sex forgave you? When did your boyfriend set you free from all you’re enslaved to? What else died so that you could be made new? And when was the last time the world promised satisfaction and actually came through?”

This month I will be reflecting on having an active faith. Active faith starts here: with the decision to put down your idols and pursue God above all else. Once your heart is here, actions will follow. In Jeremiah 11:22 it is written, “Then the cities of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem will go and cry to the gods to whom they make offerings, but they cannot save them in the time of their trouble.” Remember your savior, and put him above all else.

 

“Ideas have consequences:” says Dave Horner, in his book Mind Your Faith, “what we believe will determine how we behave, and ultimately who we become.” We are commanded in Ephesians 6 to put on our Helmet of Salvation. Thus, it is crucial when fighting spiritual warfare to hold firm to our beliefs. The best way to do this is to filter our thoughts and control what enters our mind. “Be careful little eyes what you see,” the Children’s song keeps ringing in my mind. Do not be naïve to the effects of what enters your mind, and stand firm to your beliefs.