At one point, I woke up to a confluence of a warm sleeping bag and bitter cool mountain air flecked with the last vestiges of a long hot summer. The rhododendron and camp fire smolder air was good to breath and made me feel alive.

I could barely make out the silent trees around the lake through the screen of the cabin porch where I slept on a bed lofted above the floor, complete with a bare full sized mattress that had hosted quite a few of the boys and men that had scribbled their names on the wood shelves, posts and walls all around me.

“will curtis 2005 session 2″ next to a Dave Matthews quote probably enshrined by a young college guy working as a counselor for the summer at Camp Kanuga and desperately missing his brown hair brown eyed good natured sweetheart who had gone back to Charleston for the summer to work on her tan and see her high school friends.

Thousands of these names and stories reverberated around our quiet cabin 10, urging us to remember them and consider both from whence we came and where we were that pitch bible black morning. Their names and experiences beckoned to us to carpe diem and consider the lillies.

I laid there in the immediate darkness of our cabin with 11 12 year old 7th graders sleeping and dreaming of skateboards or homework-free weekends or XBox games or God knows what and realized that it is in the still small moments that you feel The Creator pass by and you realize why you do what you do.

I fumbled through my bag in the darkness and found the pen I had brought with me. I scribbled my name in the damp and cold wood of the shelf above me with 1 Kings 19 underneath, smiled and fell back to sleep before another long day in the woods with my students.