The Blessing of the Guitar Nerds

And I'm back.

Details of the summer will trickle out to you in time. It was laboriously long and lightning-fast-short all at the same time. It was ridiculously hard but not without blessings. I'm tired of all the drama and problems and pain that have stared me in the face for the past 7 weeks, so instead,I choose to dwell on the stories of the blessings.

The camp part of my summer sucked. Life's like that sometimes. But God always brings redemption. Redemption came to me in an unexpected way this summer.

Our staff at Laurel Lake this summer was very young. Now, obviously, as one who is summer-camp-obsessed, I have a passionate love for young people. But I feel strongly about the creation of a summer camp staff, and I think it's hard to have an effective staff with a large majority of staff members who are younger than teen campers. When I realized the age demographic of our staff this summer, I was also selfishly disappionted because I assumed that I wouldn't be able to make meaningful relationships with kids who were seven years younger than I am.

I was so incredibly wrong. My opinion on the age and selection of camp staff hasn't changed. But I was so blessed by my friendships with a handful of staff members this summer who were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old. There were probably six or seven of them with whom I was close and got to know well, and who were such a blessing on my summer.

I want to tell you about three of them right now. They are affectionately called the Guitar Nerds.

Meet Cody and Dan, two of our three Guitar Nerds.

They are Peter, Dan, and Cody, and they're right around sophomore in high school age. They play guitar in a manner that could cause your brain to implode with the impossibility of their skill. Thus the "guitar" portion of their status. They rock the awkward, sometimes dorky aura that most teenagers posess with ironic style and grace. Therein lies the "nerd" part.

These kids are super cool. They are rock stars on the inside and sometimes on the outside, too. On our final night of camp, they rocked our Top Ten Countdown in a manner that was as close to an honest-to-goodness concert as you can get in an outdated gym with a broken soundsystem. (The worship was of a volume and passion and intensity that it clearly made the older, hardened Adventists in the room uncomfortable. If one closed one's eyes really tightly, one could almost forget that the event was Adventist in nature and be caught up in worship and find one's hands drawn up into the air toward heaven, expelling air through the vocal chords in unfathomable praise. The frowns of the adults around me kept me from losing myself in this manner.) I cannot express the Guitar Nerds' incredible musicianship with words. They are truly skilled.

But the thing that really gets me is their passion. To see these young'uns worship will stir the soul. Their anthem for the summer, the song with which they rocked and praised and lived, was Jesus Freak. This DC Talk song is, in my mind, the first real Christian rock song, the one that started it all. Ironically, this song's heyday came when the Guitar Nerds were practically in diapers. But to see them rock Jesus Freak made my soul sing. Those kids know how to make noise! (Check out Psalms 98:4, KJV)

Each Thursday night, my sister took her girls out after campfire to sit on the hill above the pool and sing. The guitar nerds came to play for them each week. There in the quiet, the beauty of their worship astounded me. They played song after song as the girls sang. Then, after the cabin left, they continued to play and to sing, sometimes breaking into two or three different songs at once as the music just burst out of their hearts. And, inevitably, one of them would look over at me with a grin and start playing my favorite song, Wholly Yours by David Crowder*Band, just because they know how much I love it.

On Sabbath, our Sabbath programming had an "underground worship" station, in which the campers joined Christians in a theoretical country where Christianity was illegal to worship. They entered a hallway lit only by candles for 20 minutes of singing and praying. One or two of the guitar nerds spent each Sabbath from 10AM to 4PM in that sweaty hallway, playing for cabin after cabin. Then, that evening, they played again at the top ten countdown. By Sunday morning, their fingers were raw from the playing. They never complained.

To pray with these boys humbled me. The summer I turned fifteen was the summer that God became real to me for the first time. It was then that God became more than just religion; that I realized He exists outside of church and inside of me. At fifteen, Peter, Dan, and Cody know God. Their faith is staggering and growing and clumsy and real. They invited me into their conversations with God, and I listened in as they told Him of the times they have been angry with Him and confused by Him and in awe of Him. It was standing in a circle with these kids that our church (myself included, until now) views as baby Christians that I was reminded over and over again just how real God is. Their love was as loud as their worship.

This is Cody "Slash" McCabe. In this photo, he is probably about to break a string.

There is a woman in my life who has mentored me spiritually and been with me through many years of happiness, heartache, growth, and living. She is constantly surrounded by young people whom she never stops investing in and giving to. She exhausts herself with her sacrifices for us, and has become our mentor, friend, and second mom. I've wondered more than once how and why she continues to do this. The Guitar Nerds helped me to understand her. These boys who I am so proud of and amazed by would come to me with their questions about God and relationships and life and girls and spirituality, most of which I had no answers to. So I would pray and start talking and tell them what little experience I have in these areas, and we would pray together and they would go and I would be left feeling humbled and rejoicing that God had given me the opportunity to have these precious conversations. I would be awed that they had somehow been led to believe that I was wise enough to be honored by their questions and very presence. Time and again I was left feeling that their spiritual wisdom far surpassed my own. It was I that learned from them and was blessed by them, rather than the other way around. And these moments helped me to understand why my friend keeps doing that for us. These kids are going places with God, and what a blessing it is to watch that and be a small part of it.

Random Cool Guitar Nerds Notes:

-They wrote a song this summer, which even without lyrics, I adored.

-They all acted in our hardest, longest, most-difficultly-written play this summer. This sucker had page-long monologues, very little physical action, sparse comedy, and heavy subject matter. Just pulling it off would have been a success, but they made it good. Because it was acted primarily by 15-16 year olds, the central core being Cody, Dan, and Peter, we affectionaly nick-named it "The Guitar Nerd Play." It was one of the best of the summer. Words cannot express my pride at the way they pulled it off. It was the definition of incredible. Sheer memorization of lines alone was a lot to ask, but they acted incredibly, passionately, as well.

-They like David Crowder*Band, which of course wins brownie points from me.

-Dan straightened his super-curly hair once, and it looked awesome.

-They pulled off the rap part of Jesus Freak better than any Adventist white guys should be able to.

-One Sunday during our affirmations time in staff meeting, Peter said some crazy-nice things about me ending by saying that I was always smiling and rocking my Crowder music, which just did wonders for the state of my heart.

-Dan has a grandpa hat from Wal-Mart that he makes look way cooler than any grandpa hat from Wal-Mart should be allowed to look.

-All three have that long, emo hair style going on. You know, the kind where to see their eyes is a blessed and rare occurance. Peter has this signature thing that he does with it where he flips his head to get the hair out of his eyes for a half instant in order to see what's going on around him before being plunged beneath his hair once more. It brings me joy. This is Peter caught in mid-head-toss.

-Peter is studying the early Christian church in his Bible, and has a similar burden about unity in the church on his heart that I do, and shared his thoughts with me eloquently.

-When I told Dan goodbye, he said, "Well here's a goodbye for you." and played a Crowder song.

-Cody "Slash" McCabe broke something like ten strings this summer without even trying. This guy plays like a maniac.


I've written a ridiculous amount of words about my friends the Guitar Nerds, and yet I feel as though I have not adequately described to you their coolness and awesomeness. They have blessed me beyond words. God gives some of the most incredible gifts in places we absolutely least expect them. Which leads me to the conclusion that as awesome as my friends Cody, Peter, and Dan, are, God is SO INCREDIBLY more AWESOME.

Even when life is sucky! How cool is that??