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Jun 08, 2024 06:00am

Festival of Shelters

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My mom entertained four young kids all summer long with a husband who got up for work by 4:30 am every morning (allowing him time to read his Bible, shower, and guzzle down coffee before driving an hour to the paper mill to work for about 10 hours). I can only imagine the amount of snacks, questions, messes, and chaos we filled her hours with.

In a very wise move on my parents’ part, we would often load up and camp at Paul B Johnson State Park or Little Black Creek Campground and Park for weeks at a time. With either option, Dad had a shorter drive to the paper mill, and we were surrounded by a plethora of entertainment options to keep us busy all day, every day.

Those camping trips created some of my fondest memories-fishing for hours, sometimes even getting to eat what we caught; swimming until we couldn’t swim anymore-doing tricks and games on floats, and using our arms to glide across the water and explode water walls at each other; exploring the wooden, splinter-ridden playground undergirded by sand and pine cone burrs-our Kingdom full of adventures; riding bikes around the campsite roads, pretending it was our own little town; playing card games on the picnic table and badminton by our tent; reading books or playing games inside the tent when it was rainy-which we would swear happened much more often if my parents chose Little Black Creek; even getting to ride the innertube or ski behind the boat when Mom felt up for it or Dad got back from work.

Most mornings, we woke to the smell of bacon and pancakes on the griddle. We ate Little Debbies and chugged juice boxes and ate crates of those flavor iced tubes of frozen, juicy goodness, and all of the things that taste like summer.

Sometimes, a local church might host a VBS in a chapel in the park, and we would get to do crafts and learn songs for at least half the day for a week. And, surprisingly, there are more families than you might imagine who choose long-term camping, like my wise parents, which allowed us the opportunity to make friends during our stay-some of which we stayed in touch with for many years.

One of the clearest memories I have of these amazing trips is that our parents would have to remind us the same thing over and over again, when we were playing games in our tent during a downpour. Mom would patiently remind us to not touch the ceiling of the tent, as all four of us wanted so badly to chase the raindrops. We heard the message loud and clear, but, for whatever reason, at least one of us would rebelliously push a finger along the tent following the drop to the edge. Our parents were not being overly restrictive or mean by not allowing this ever-so-intriguing activity. When we did that, out of some awful magic we didn’t understand, the rain would then be able to permeate our tent.

Let me tell you, waking up to all of our sleeping bags soaked through did not make for a fun day for anyone. Not only did my poor mother have to fork out the change at the nearest laundromat to dry all of our soaked belongings, with 4 energetic kids in tow, but that meant we were sitting in a laundromat for hours instead of adventuring at camp.

As I was reading my Bible this morning, I read how the Israelites settled in after being allowed to return home from captivity. Ezra read God’s Word aloud, and the people were so excited. They celebrated this gift they had missed for years, and they decided it was time to be obedient to the instructions given to them by Moses long ago. In Nehemiah 8:13-18, God’s people excitedly observed The Festival of Shelters. A proclamation was made, instructing the people to go to the hills, gather branches, bring them back, and make “shelters” out of these branches. Everyone who had returned from captivity joined in during the festival and celebrated with great joy-more joy than they had since the days of Joshua!

As I looked into what The Festival of Shelters was about, I read that it was to serve as a reminder to God’s people that He freed them from slavery, and they had to live in the desert in similar temporary/unstable huts as they wandered 40 years. I also read that the huts built during the festival were to be shack-like and unstable-a physical reminder that nothing outside of God would ever provide the solid, permanent, abiding strength He offers.

The Israelites would use this time to remember God’s faithfulness to them in the past and realign their hearts to trust God alone, referencing 1 Chronicles 29:15, which says, “We are foreigners and strangers in your sight, as were all our ancestors. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope.”

As I read about the instructions given to build a “sukkah” that was flimsy and unsturdy, symbolizing how Abraham trusted God, I imagined our tent after the four of us curious kids had pushed on the ceiling and let the rain pour in. Our temporary shelter could be a stretch of the symbol of a sukkah, not impervious to the dangers of the storms around us.