We have come to the last day of camp. I remember a lot of “last day of camp” experiences. A lot of planning and care has gone into creating a welcoming place and forming Christian community. Care has been given to include each person and to find ways to say to each, “You are welcome, you are treasured, you are an important part of our community.” Now, after just a week, the time has come to go our separate ways. After breakfast, there will be an hour or so for loading up our cars, cleaning up our spaces, and doing what we can to help the camp staff prepare for the next group of campers. Then there will be a closing experience and we’ll get on the road. We have a seven hour drive back home and we’ll probably extend that by at least an hour as we are planning to take an alternate highway across much of the state and make a stop at the fruit stands around Wenatchee to pick up a couple of cases of fruit to take home. Hopefully there will be peaches and new season apples available.

There will be a few tears at the closing circle. There always are. It is not easy to say good bye. And we have made friends who are important to us. However, we have done this many times before.

Fifty years ago, there was a youth camp ending at our camp in Montana. One of the challenges for the organizers of the camp had been transportation for a group of youth from Missoula, Montana. I don’t know how they had gotten to camp, but they needed a ride home. At the last minute, when other options had been exhausted, my father offered a truck he had with a high box on the back. I drove the truck up to camp from our shop and loaded up the campers with all of their suitcases and sleeping bags. It must have been a dusty ride for them, coming down from the mountain on the dirt road. We stopped in our town for lunch, drove three miles up over the continental divide to Butte for a stop, where they all got out of the back of the truck and stretched their legs. Then it was back into the truck for another couple of hours of driving to their home town.

Of course we wouldn’t haul people that way these days. There were no seat belts in the back of that truck. There weren’t even seats. They rode with their sleeping bags and pillows as their only padding. They didn’t have any cover over the top of their heads. The truck was designed for a much heavier load and I suspect that it was a pretty rough ride. The youth were in good spirits and sang camp songs along the way.

Our trip will be more luxurious. Our car is comfortable and we have air conditioning for the hot stretches of highway. It is a route we’ve traveled many times before and it will feel good to be heading home.

Over the years, I am sure that I have used stories of leaving camp many times in sermons on the transfiguration. We have mountaintop experiences, but they do not last all of our lives. The time comes for us to return to our everyday existence. We leave camp, knowing that it will be difficult to explain all of the ways the time at camp has impacted our lives. We know it will be hard to tell the story. You can’t hang onto those mountain top experiences. The day comes when it is time to pack up and head home.

We are much older and we may be a bit wiser now than we were all of those years ago. We’ve been to camp a lot of times. We’ve gone through plenty of friendship circles and other exercises in saying good bye. There is much at home to beckon us. We are eager to see our grandchildren and to get back to our home church. We are looking forward to being in worship with our congregation tomorrow.

Part of life is learning to say good bye. It is also an important part of living in community. In our church, people are always coming and going. New members are welcomed with great joy and special ceremony. Babies are born and grow up. Youth go off to college and other life adventures. There are marriages and divorces and family blending. Some of our members reach the ends of their lives and we acknowledge their passing with funeral services. Families move from our community to another. We wish them well and we pray that they will find a new community that loves and values them as much as we do. Living in community means that we need to develop our skills at saying good bye.

The good bye after camp isn’t the hardest kind of good bye that we have faced. Coming to the end of 25 years of serving a congregation and moving from our home in Rapid City was a challenging good bye for us. There were plenty of tears. There is much that we miss, especially the people. As their lives unfold and we hear the news, we often wish we were there to share their journey. But it was the right thing for us to move on and to open the possibility of new leadership and new directions for the congregation. In many ways they and us are still adjusting to the change. They continue to search for just the right new pastor to lead the congregation. We continue to wrestle with our role in a new community. Life is about saying hello and good bye.

It has been a good week. We have enjoyed being at camp. There were lots of fun adventures. We’ve made some new friends. We’ve learned a few new songs. Now we are given the opportunity for another spiritual practice - the practice of taking leave.

Every human life faces grief. Learning to say good bye is practice for the good byes that lie ahead for us. Like the other lessons of camp, it is a blessing.