Faith

Another awesome thing about camp is how much everybody here loves God.  Camp Tecumseh's motto is "I am Third."  That means that in our lives, we try to put God first, other people second, and ourselves third.  We learn about God through chapels, songs, prayers, the I Am Third motto, and more.

Chapels
 During the summer, the counselors lead chapel every morning.  Kettelhut Chapel overlooks the lake, and the Green Cathedral overlooks the Tippecanoe River.  Chapels usually start with music, and then there is a skit that we learn from.  Then the counselors tell a little bit about their lives and explain what they want us to learn from the skit, and then they read from the Bible and pray out loud.  Mom and Dad say that it is awesome for us to have so many great role models!  We like to go to chapels with our mom in the mornings.  There is a special bench just for "camp kids" at the back of each chapel.  Here, you can see one of the chapels from last summer:



Songs
At every chapel, we sing lots of great songs.  The words are always projected up front, but we know a lot of them by heart.  We love how the counselors make up fun motions to go with every song!  Chapel is our favorite place to sing, but the older campers also get to do sing the chapel songs at a weekly Songfest at night.  Mom says that this summer, we might get to go to some of the Songfests and watch from the back!  Here's an example of one of the songs we sing at chapel.... and that's our mom and dad up front, leading the song with our friends Jordan and Luke!



Prayers at Meals
Another really cool thing is that we get to pray before all the meals in the dining halls.  Sometimes one of the counselors does a spoken grace.  But most of the time, we all sing a grace from one of the painted prayer boards that hang around the dining hall.  Our favorites are the "Johnny Appleseed" grace and "Neath These Tall Green Trees."
 
 


I Am Third
Being "third" isn't the same thing as being "last."  It just means that love God the most, that you care about other people and try to help them whenever you can, and that you don't think you're more important than everybody else.  We love camp because all the counselors and staff really try to live this way!  They teach the campers all about it, and when the campers go home at the end of the week, they each take a card like this home with them:

The Sagamore Creed
On the other side of that card is the Sagamore Creed.  It explains more about what it means to be Third.  Every week at closing campfire, the "chief" comes and teaches the campers about the Sagamore Creed.  Then, when they go back to their cabins that night, they all talk about it and every camper gets to choose a bead to represent one part of the Creed that they want to work on throughout the year.  The campers take this really seriously.  A lot of them wear their bead for the whole year, and when they come back to camp again the next summer, they talk with their counselors about how they developed in that area during the year.

More
Every night during summer camp, the kids all do devotions in their cabins with their counselors.  We've never gotten to do this because we're not old enough to be resident campers yet.  But Mom and Dad say that the counselors read the Bible with their campers and teach them about God, and they all pray together.  The oldest campers (the Warriors and Pathfinders) also get to have big fun group activities (Warrior Workshop and Pathfinder Pow-Wow) in the evenings where they play games and do skits that teach them about faith.  We can't wait until we're old enough to get to that stuff!


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