As you plan your summer camping trip with your group, let’s hope your campers don’t go through what Awana co-founder Art Rorheim’s kids experienced!
Rorheim, who celebrated his 90th birthday in 2010, has worked with Awana, the global children’s ministry, since 1941.
While I was directing Pals in that original club at the North Side Gospel Center, God wonderfully gave us hundreds of kids. We had promised them a special camping trip if they reached their goal. They did it with enthusiasm, so we planned for an overnight camping trip, with eighty Pals, to the Dells in Wisconsin.
As director, I did my utmost to plan it well so that we wouldn’t have things go wrong. The weather was beautiful on the day of the trip. I had small motorboats for the campers to use that their pup tents would fit in. We traveled down to this beautiful little island. There we had a nice campfire and put up our tents. To see all these little eager-beaver Pals so enthusiastic about what they were doing was just a thrill.
Well, the time came for them to get into their tents, and we said it was time to get some sleep. They were most cooperative. How little did I suspect what was going to take place then!
About a couple of hours after they were in bed, I saw a little bit of lightning, and then there was wind and thunder. Little flashlights went on in all of the tents. I knew what was going through their minds: They were somewhat scared. It wasn’t long before more than a little thunder came through. As the rain came down, the wind swept furiously across the island, and every pup tent blew over and fell to the ground. I heard 80 clubbers just about crying because they were desperate and didn’t know what to do. There was no shelter at the island, so with the leaders, we loaded the kids into the boats and got them back to the mainland, where we all sat in the bus all night waiting for the sun to come up the next day. That was a long night. It was quite an experience to sit there with everybody soaking wet.
As we arrived back on the island the next morning to retrieve our belongings, I went to pick up a tent that had fallen and to my amazement, and perhaps near-horror, I saw a Pal who was still sleeping, never even realizing that we had all gone!
Looking back, we realize that in today’s world I probably would have been accused of child abuse; perhaps there would be headlines about the neglect that I showed. God spared us from that—and that little Pal has been a missionary for more than 30 years, serving the Lord as a Bible translator. What a joy to see the fruits of the Scripture seeds that were sown years ago.
Driving home with the clubbers that next day was a discouraging time because I wasn’t anxious to meet the parents and tell them just what had taken place. But while I was driving along, everybody in the bus sleeping and tired, a little Pal piped up and said, “Mr. Rorheim, last night was a special night to me. At the campfire I trusted Christ as my Savior.”
All of a sudden, I realized that the entire trip had been worth it because one little Pal had become a new creature in Christ. Since that time, I have talked to many of those campers, who are now family men; and they look back at that as one of the highlights of their club experience. We really never know the impact we are making on clubbers as we spend time with them and take personal interest in them.
Excerpted from Mr. Awana: Sixty-plus Years of Changing the World for Christ by by Art Rorheim. Used with permission of Grace Acres Press (GraceAcresPress.com).
