New Levels

“Is this Harry Potter?”

It’s the question most asked in the Boys’ Lodge, as boys of all shapes, ages, and sizes come trickling in through the heavy-falling snow, finished with their worship session and full of plans for the upcoming talent show. They blow in from the storm, shake off the snowflakes with whole-body convulsions as they stomp through the living room, and turn to the glowing blue of the TV, where three women, three tubs of cookie dough, and three foil-covered cookie sheets are working hard. We’ve been making cookies all evening, and having finished Prince Caspian a bit ago I slipped back over the path to the Girls’ Lodge, holding my breath through music and sermon to rummage through Erika’s bag to get the next feature of the evening, the next amusement as we bake cookies for 85 teenagers.

“Yep. Number six.”

“Six isn’t out yet.”

“Oh, right. Five, then.”

“Wait, are you making cookies? Can I have one?”

Erika emerges from the kitchen, where she’s been overseeing the erratic camp ovens with their precious treats, a steaming cookie on her spatula. The boys’ eyes widen, their hands extend like urchins’, and Erika tips the hot cookies into them with a grin.

“Enjoy!”

Soon we have gathered a number of disciples, and their comments are an amusing mixture of Harry Potter commentary (“Ugh. I hate that Umbrage lady!”) and requests for more cookies.

After almost four years as a small group leader for five girls at Bethany Community Church, this is my tenth winter retreat. I’ve come as a student, all mixed up in the thrill of going away and the drama of boys and learning to ski, and as a leader, full of enthusiasm and eager to draw everyone in to the spirit of frenzied excitement that seems so integral to all youth retreats. This year, for the first time, I am coming as neither: I am the cook. One of three cooks, actually, I have spent three days helping to prepare and serve food to kids and leaders from the city, reveling in the glory of time in the snow without cell phones.

This moment, like so many others this weekend, reminds me of something else, taking me so quickly back to being a child at another mountain retreat chalet, where I assisted my mother in silence while she prepared French bread pizzas or baked potatoes to the college kids listening to my father’s Bible teaching in the living room. I remember handing hot cookies to boys twice my height as they came in from the cold, when they patted my head and their faces bore that same amazement that these ones do tonight.

Still, as much as it recalls childhood, this weekend stands in striking contrast to more recent retreats. There has been no coaxing and cajoling, no confiscating of cell phones or odd games for which I exaggerate enthusiasm. There have been no kids hanging off me, no squeals of admiration or inside jokes. Indeed, this weekend has been quiet, time spent in the kitchen with adults, interacting with kids only as I serve meals. And, I’m surprised to realize, that has felt right. I know that I am doing something important here, even sacred, in providing for basic needs; it’s just different than it was.

I’ve been considering lately the expectation for Young Adulthood, where challenges and lessons pop up like obstacles on Super Mario, at predictable intervals, with a time-tested method for conquering them. But what happens in this game when the protagonist doesn’t go to graduate school or move around the world, when neither marriage nor parenthood looms on the horizon? Instead of having levels that change when goals are reached, does this game look like a long Career Staircase, begun at an early age and climbed for the rest of adulthood? Even if the Career is a good one, like teaching, might she get to the point where climbing is mastered and wish to ascend to some other level, grow in some new way?

I lean across the counter in the kitchen, pushing a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies out to the edge of it along with a frigid gallon of milk. A boy barely taller than the counter, who I’ve watched grow up from infancy to now, in a snow hat and wide-eyed and full of Harry Potter opinions, approaches the cookies. Closing his fingers around one and breathing deeply, with satisfaction, he turns back to the movie with a nod of thanks. I nod back, thinking how things change, how I change, without expecting or demanding transformation. I'm thinking of the myth of static circumstances, and the growth that is not only possible but completely inevitable to those of us who live with eyes and hearts open to the people and places in which we find ourselves. The challenges are different in these unpredictable levels, outside of seeming conventions I find in unfair comparisons. But there are twists here, too, because I am growing within my profession and relationships, changing in a place that is changing with me. And I’m thankful, all at once, for the moment and the kids and the life to which I’ll return from this retreat, one that is never the same as I wake anew each day.