People used to believe lighthouse keepers went crazy from solitude. It probably had more to do with the fact that they used mercury to make the lights spin.
I am the Executive Director of a summer camp. Nobody knows what that means, or what I do. Explaining my job is confusing. Everyone knows who their cabin leader is or the person running the camp program. They are the cruise director or the captain of the ship. Everyone sees them as they guide the ship and arrange fun activities, and that is not what I get to do.
The executive director is the lighthouse keeper.
I get to stand on a nearby shore watching the tides roll in, watching the weather turn, and making sure the lights stay on and keep the ships from crashing against dangerous, unseen rocks. I am the executive director of a camp, and it is not like any other job I have done at camp.
“Katie,” Heather’s voice was pinched and low with emotion and tiredness, “would you step in as the interim director at camp?”
I had been serving on the board for Camp Bethel, which I had been attending and working with for 21 years, for less than a year, when the chair of the board, my friend Heather, called me up and told me that our newly hired executive director had backed out of the position and in one month, there would be no one in the position, and then she asked me if I would be willing to step in as the interim.
At 11:00 o’clock at night, I did not consider the question very deeply.
Maybe if I had taken a few more minutes to think about it, I would have understood a little deeper what I was getting into and could have been a little more prepared. There was nothing to consider more deeply. I understood two things perfectly. First, the previous director was someone I cared about and he needed to be able to move on to another position. Second, camp needed someone to take on that role or shut down after 62 years of ministry.
“Yep. I can do that.”
I had done everything there is to do at camp. I had worked in the kitchens and been a cabin leader, I had planned and organized and run retreats, I had directed a week of junior high camp. I could do it. I could serve as the interim director. I saw myself as taking over as the captain of a ship and sailing us toward the horizon. I had no idea what I was actually doing.
The executive director is the lighthouse keeper. I walk the empty trails and listen to the quiet of sleeping cabins. I smell the smoke from long cold fire pits. I hear the echoes of games played in the fields. I stand on the shore and watch as ships pass by dangerous rocks, full of passengers enjoying themselves, unaware of the disasters on the edge of their vision. When the storms come up, I raise the alarm and close the passages, knowing that I will be left behind when the travelers find another route, knowing that the people running those ships might be mad at me for stopping them on their journey.
You would think that a solitude like that might drive someone mad. That the silence from empty cabins that I have seen and heard full of life would be deafening. Its not. It is the good quiet. The peaceful moments when the chaos is done, and the joy still hums in the air. When you can hear the quiet whispers of “well done.”