I am Here For You: A week at Camp Rainbow by Brad Borders

Reposted with permission from The Edgewood Dispatch with additional photos.

His voice cracked a bit and his eyes welled with tears when this question was asked.

“Who is your special person?”

Quietly he said, “My special person is my mom.”

This past week my wife and I volunteered with Rainbow Kidz, a program of Hospice of Iredell County. Here’s their website description:

“Rainbow Kidz offers two grief camp sessions for children during the summer. Camp Rainbow provides fun recreational activities and structured therapeutic opportunities to encourage sharing, to learn healthy ways to cope with grief, and to support healing.”

Tammy and I raised our hands to serve with elementary school children.

Rainbow Kidz is led by my long-time friend Leigh Ann Darty, who may not be large in stature, but she’s probably the biggest person I know. She has been advocating for children in the midst of grief for over 20 years.

I played football with her little brother Phillip at Statesville High School. He was a year older than me, our quarterback, and someone we looked up to. He died of cancer when he was 17. It was devastating for the team, but even more for his family.

Leigh Ann credits this time of her life to her mission of helping children through grief. Back in those days there weren’t many specific programs to help the healing process.

Leigh Ann speaks of Phillip as her special person, and this term is ubiquitous throughout the camp week.

Camp days are filled with energy and fun, but also intentionality. Seventy elementary school kids showed up this week. All of them had lost someone. Some had lost their “Poppy” or “Mamaw.” Others had lost a brother or sister. Many had lost a mom or dad. Many of the deaths they experienced were sudden, and some were incredibly traumatic.

Tammy and I knew each kid had a story.

I’ve been around death a lot over my years in ministry and through my 20 years as a chaplain in the Army. I’ve had to tell children that their daddy wasn’t coming home from some violent place on the other side of the world.

But most of my interactions were at the point of impact at a notification or at a memorial or funeral.

This week was different for us. We spent hours playing with these kids, having snacks, and hearing their stories as best as they could tell them.

Each day the kids arrive at a drop-off line, and they are celebrated when they arrive. It’s like a red carpet event as the staff helps them out of their cars. Rounds of applause and cheers ring out from the volunteers. Smiles are everywhere. I started yelling, “Congratulations! You made it!”

As the children emerge from their cars, you can see the wide eyed anticipation and wonder. The energy is incredible.

The camp takes place at a local Boy Scout camp offered up by the church that sponsors the troop. It has everything needed to make the week awesome. A cabin, a pavilion, a wide open grass area, all surrounded by trees. During transition time the campers play basketball, kick soccer balls around, and investigate the property, all under the watchful eye of a large cadre of caring volunteers.

In the afternoons there are structured activities like fitness, equine therapy, drum circles, and yoga, just to name a few.

But in the mornings it is group time.

This is where the real work is done. The hard questions are asked. The emotions come out, but the healing takes place.

The leader of the group Tammy and I were assigned to is named Michelle. Her heart is as big as all outdoors. She knows nearly every kid already because Rainbow Kidz is not only a camp during the summer but also an ongoing program in every school in our county year-round.

She greets them with hugs and smiles. During group time she keeps things moving and structured. I wondered how this would play out.

Group time lasts about 45 minutes, and there is a curriculum.

Each day the kids introduce themselves. They tell their age and who their special person is. That’s from day one. They call it the elephant in the room, and they name it. The elephant is the official mascot of Rainbow Kidz.

So this is what you hear, as I opened with.

“My special person is my mom.”

Reality sets in when you hear them say it out loud. You hear pain, loss, and hurt in that simple sentence.

But the amazing thing is that none of this is done alone. Many kids, and many adults, when death rears its head, feel alone. No one is alone at Camp Rainbow.

After we went around the group and heard all those kids tell who their special person was, I looked over at my bride, who loves everything about children. She is, and always has been, a mother. S

he was crying, as I expected. It wouldn’t be the last time.

Every day the staff opens with the whole camp together using their tag line. Leigh Ann has a bullhorn and screams instructions, and in a roar of little voices you hear, “I am HERE for YOU!” Then they go on, pointing at each other while continuing with, “AND YOU, AND YOU, AND YOU!”

It’s loud, and it’s repeated every day, almost like a little creed so every kid knows they are not alone and so they know they are helping someone else not be alone.

Leigh Ann’s daughter came up with an idea last year to write encouraging messages on clothespins and give them out to the kids. They were encouraged to give them away to others, and the kids started calling it getting clipped.

This year one child decided to put a clip in my beard.

It caught on.

The next thing I knew I had seven or eight dangling from my rather lengthy facial hair. Every day when they’d arrive at camp the clipping continued. I think the last day I must have had 15 or 20 colorful clips with kid words on them hanging off my face.

They got heavy too!

It’s pretty magnificent.

Our group of 17 kids came up with a name for their team. We were assigned the color red to keep things organized. This precious little girl, 10 years old, said, “Since we’re red, and I have cardinal earrings in, we should be the Cardinals.”

The group agreed and gave themselves the name Red Courageous Cardinals.

Courage is a virtue that is honored at Camp Rainbow. Every time someone shows courage in sharing a story they get the Courage Chain around their neck. It’s a big, gaudy, shiny chain the size of a logging chain in the color of their group. It’s a visible reminder of the act of courage displayed.

Mr. T would be awfully proud.

The little girl with the cardinal earrings talked about her grandfather as she cried. She was so descriptive and open and honest.

A little boy next to her adorned her with the Courage Chain, sliding it over her head and around her neck.

It was a sight to behold.

Such love and caring for each other.

Every kid at the camp stands on common ground, ground permeated by loss, sadness, anger, and lots of why questions. It’s in that common ground, in the community of shared pain, that healing arises like shoots out of rich soil in springtime after a long, cold, gray winter.

The name Cardinals got me thinking.

Down here in the South, cardinals are said to be visits from our “special people.” Cardinals mate for life, from what I’ve been told, and they aren’t migratory. So if you see one around your house, it’s their home too.

If you’ve read some of my articles from this year you’ll know that I’ve taken up learning how to carve. One of the very first carvings I did was a cardinal.

So when that little girl with the cardinal earrings said our group should be the Cardinals, I knew what had to be done.

Every kid in our group needed one.

So that day I went home and got started. As I worked I thought about and prayed for each child as my old fingers tried to control the knife. I worked into the evening and then the next day. Each one takes some time, but I must say it was love that provided the energy.

The night before the last day of camp, Tammy and I set up an assembly line in our kitchen to paint them all. We listened to the radio while we did it, old school. As we worked together we talked about the kids, our kids, and other things in life.

It was a memorable evening, just the two of us.

The next day I gave each cardinal individually to each child in our group. I got a lot of thank-yous and astonished looks when they realized it had once been a tree, then a block of wood, and finally a little red cardinal sitting atop a stump.

The last one I gave away was to the little girl with the cardinal earrings because she arrived late.

When I handed it to her she looked up at me with a smile and said, “It’s a cardinal!”

I said to her, “It was you who gave me the idea! I made one for everybody.”

She grinned from ear to ear and hugged me tight.

It really was a moment I’ll never forget.

All this week at home I’ve been re-listening to a book called The Shack by William Paul Young. It’s a novel about a man, after experiencing a tragic loss, meets with God for the weekend. It made a bunch of religious people really mad when it came out 25 years ago when I first read it.

It didn’t make me mad.

It made me want to know God even more and for God to know me even more.

I suspect Mr. Young’s vision of God did not fall within the decorum of accepted good theology.

In that book there is a line that God says to the man. His name is Mac.

God says, “Mac, I’m especially fond of you!”

I thought about that line all week, but even more on that last day.

All the families came to pick up their kids on the last day. Those folks are hurting too. We met so many of them.

The mission of Rainbow Kidz has been a game changer, not just for these kids but for these families. And they are grateful,

Camp closed with a song written by a local musician just for Rainbow Kidz. All the children sang the chorus together. It went like this to a groovy tune:

I’m here for you
You’re here for me
Strong like elephants
Together we can be
Holding memories close
Love will carry through
With hope and courage in our hearts
I’m here for you

It was a hymn.

Oh, how I wish you could have heard it. In this world that many days is so awful, to hear those kids singing about simply community in a time of loss gave me hope.

I couldn’t help sensing that God was there saying,

“I am especially fond of all of you.”

Then I remembered something Eugene Peterson wrote in his paraphrase of the Bible called The Message. “Jesus looked at his disciples and said, “Don’t push these children away. Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in the kingdom.”

Let that sit for a minute.

If you’d like to support a truly life changing, life giving, love filled mission that invests in children across the spectrum who have experienced loss, please take a look at their mission here to find out more.

And…Perhaps if we all said,

“I am here for you!”

This world might be a better place.