Wow, what a day today. The last day of camp is always wild - full of lots of emotions and connections. We started the day off with worship and session - kids were pretty wiped from a late night last night. After session we had The Battle of Helms Deep. As you can see from the pictures, it was a huge battle. The game took place on a huge hill, with our team defending the flag. Each team had thousand of water balloons and flour bombs (panty-hose filled with flour about the size of a tennis ball) and water noodles to use as a sword. Once you got wet, the flour stuck like nothing else. The air was filled with flour like it was smoke. I'm still finding this gunk in different orfices of my body. Is it okay to eat a flour buger?

Chris, Shawn, Mark, Mike and I then went to play paintball. I took out lots of kids, but got lit up myself, all three drawing wounds drawing blood. It was a great time.

The highlight of today was our youth group time. We messed around for a few doing a tradition we've had for a while - seeing which group could build a human structure that could reach the highest. We then sat in a circle and shared our favorite moments of the week. This is where the paycheck for this week comes. Kids talked about the relationships they'd built, the way their views had changed about people, growing closer in their walk with God, their intimacy with Jesus and most of all the worship. A number of our kids talked about how they went from being people who didn't sing, to having their hearts touched by the worship and really connecting with God at a heart level through music. I was so proud of our kids as a I sat there looking around at them. A lot of these kids I've known since before sixth grade and I've seen them grow up. I started to tell the kids what I was thankful for and got pretty choked up. I'd seen these kids treat other people well, grow, change and laughed with them.

The band ended up the evening with an amazing set of worship which kids really responded to and connected with. Again, the band was amazing. We then went down and played dodge ball, where I messed up my arm throwing. I kept throwing after I hurt it, which it turns out was a bad move. It hurt to the point that it was numb. I ate lots of advil and the pain seems to be subsiding.

Tomorrow, we're moving out. We're having the kids clean their rooms tonight or else they can choose to wake up at 6:15 AM to clean up and get to breakfast by 8 all packed and ready to go. If they clean up tonight, they can sleep in until 7. Funny, most of them are cleaning tonight.

We're all beat, especially the leadership team. We've all had 5 hours of sleep max and we're ready to head home.