Day 28 Thursday June 24th 2010

Well this was the second, and most packed day of the family camp. It was a good, but tiring day! First we started off with breakfast, then a morning lecture by Ted Turnau, who was our guest speaker for camp this year. Ted and his family currently live in Prague, Czech Republic, and their sending church is "Redeemer" in Winston-Salem, NC. Redeemer is in the same presbytery with "Summer Oaks PCA", "Grace Fellowship PCA", and "Meadowview PCA". The Turnau's used to live in Winston-Salem, and know Lexington well because of our famous barbecue! It really is a small world! Here I am in Latvia, with a family currently living in Prague, and we used to live about 30 minutes from each other! I think it's kind of cool. Anyway, the title for the camp was "The Nature of Truth and the Truth about Nature". This is because some Latvians participate in pagan nature worship. The Jāni celebration is the most important time of the year for these pagan worshipers, thus the need for this type of teaching at this time of year. This was the first time that I heard Ted speak, and I really enjoyed it. I felt like the teaching was very clear, and very direct. He didn't hold anything back! A couple of times I almost let out a loud ''Amen'' because he was just nailing it and preaching the truth, but I held back however, partially because I was too shy, and partially because I didn't want to distract anyone from the lecture... Anyway, after each lecture we had ''small groups'', and I was helping Mārtiņš, and Carl lead the teenage small group. We played some fun games, had a little discussion, and we sang some songs in English. I was in charge of the music including: picking out the songs, typing up and printing the song sheets, and teaching the new songs to the teens. The teens really enjoyed the music! I had a funny mistake however, because we were singing early in the morning and with little sleep, my voice gave out on one of the high notes and jumped up to a higher pitch like I was going through puberty again! It was funny enough that I laughed out loud during the song, because I just couldn't hold it in! Things like this are good for my humility! ... During our free time in the middle of the day, some of the youth and I walked down to the lake for some swimming. The water was nice and refreshing. It was a little cool compared to home, but it was quite nice. I think I'm starting to get used to this stuff! Anyway, after swimming was dinner and another lecture. Then I went to dancing lessons taught by Egils Šmagris. Egils is a professional dancer that attends RRBC with his family. He is very gifted, and an excellent teacher. This being said I still could hardly get the hang of it! I just don't have the coordination between my hands and feet! It seems like I can do one part or the other, not both at the same time! I enjoyed watching Egils demonstrate how it was supposed to be done dancing with his daughter Evita, who is also a talented dancer of course. After dancing, some of the men (both youth and adults) wanted to play some basketball in the gym. I told them that I wasn't going to play because I'm terrible at basketball, but one of the teens didn't even know the rules so I wound up playing anyway! Once we were through playing basketball (my team lost, partially because of me), the teens and I went for a midnight swim in the lake! The Latvians just love midnight swimming! I'm not really sure why. =) ... Well that's about it for today, Čau!
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P.S. An interesting note about the facility that we were in this year. The building is called Ivandes Mansion. It was built in the 1850's for a German ''Baron'' or landowner. It was destroyed sometime after 1900, but was rebuilt around 1910. It really was an interesting place! It had really fancy architecture like you would expect for a mansion... just thought y'all might like to know about it!