Daily Story: Feb. 16

Every summer my youth group goes down to Jenny's Creek, West Virginia to run a kid's camp for a week. I'm convinced that Jenny's Creek is like nowhere else. First off, it's incredibly beautiful. It's this valley with huge mountains everywhere you look, covered in trees. You can see the stars at night- me and my friends would lay out on the grass every night for hours, just staring at them. 

The first year I went, I couldn't believe somebody could actually live somewhere they could see that every single day of their lives. Here's a picture, to prove it. :] I wish I had a picture of the stars, but sadly enough it seems that stars are near impossible to get a picture of :/

Jenny's Creek blew me away. But all that... nature and green stuff... is just normal down there. Also normal is living in a trailer. Everybody does. Some trailers are nicer than others, with added-on porches and whatnot but that's basically the level of poverty there. Some of the kids don't really have shoes... the rich ones have cable TV. The kids are super tough too. The stuff they have to handle every day... it's crazy. 

I remember this one time when one of the adults, Steve, was driving a van around all the little backroads to pick up some kids for the camp. He gets to the first house and stops for a 10 year old boy and his little sister. The sister's on their porch all scared and the brother's out in front of their house with this huge gun. It's practically bigger than him and he's shooting it at the ground. Then he puts the gun back in the house and the two kids run over to the van. The boy says with a grin, "Hey Steve wanna see the yellowback I just killed?"

 If you don't know what a yellowback is... its a snake. A really bad one. They told us about these snakes as a way to make sure we were so scared we'd stay out of the creek. And this ten-year-old kid just shot it dead and went off to kids camp. Another normal summer day...