Dynamite.

This song came on the radio on my way to work this afternoon. I instinctively turned it up super loud and would have thrown my hands up and started dancing if I hadn't been driving...It's amazing how easily a song, just one song, can stir up a million memories and never ever get old no matter how many times you hear it. 

Dynamite brings forth the adrenaline rush of bursting into a room of screaming high schoolers during my week in Saranac, NY. It will forever serve as a reminder of the best year of my life: Young Life camp. If you don't know what Young Life is, you're seriously missing out! Young Life is an organization that goes into high schools and middle schools and strives to show the kids of those schools how to cross from death to life through a relationship with Jesus Christ. I didn't hear about YL until my sophomore year, and man did I find out about it at just the right moment in my life (it's amazing how God does those kind of things...). 

The friends that I had made shortly after moving here started to drift away from me ever so slowly by that October. I was alone. A good friend of mine Carly Kelsick (check out here awesome story at http://www.icarlymission.blogspot.com!) invited me to Fall Weekend which is basically summer camp condensed into two and a half days. I was so hesitant at first, I was still new to the area and literally knew just about no one who was going. But I caved, signed up, and went. I was glued to Carly's hip for most of the weekend still that same shy kid I'd always been. Needless to say that weekend changed my life. I learned to love YL with a passion so great I wanted to participate in any way I possibly could. 

That summer I got the opportunity to attend YL summer camp in Saranac, NY. A lot of my older friends had gone to Saranac a couple of summers before and could only speak the highest praises of the camp. Other than being set in the picturesque Adirondacks, Saranac was filled with tons and tons of people from all over the country who loved the Lord. My most poignant memories of that camp are in the club room, in that room we danced, sang, laughed, and listened to talks that challenged who we were and how we were living. Every single time we entered that room Dynamite was blasting in the speakers; we would even run around camp during the day singing and dancing to that song. 

It's safe to say that Saranac and YL have literally changed my life, I truly believe that I wouldn't even be writing this blog today if it weren't for that awesome camp and organization. My very closest friends today come from the cabin of 17 girls I spent my week with. We watched each other grow there in ways that we would have never been able to see back home. Every single time I hear Dynamite all I can do is smile, it's such a wonderful reminder of that amazing week (: 

Facebook "boycott" Day 1: Gotta find a better name for that....But this thing is harder than I expected! Thanks to Morgan for keeping me accountable though and totally taking away the temptation of checking it (: I'm thinking that after a little while I might not even miss it...we'll see what happens!