“So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.” —Colossians 3:12–14

Our GROW theme this year is “Wear Love.” As campers explore this week, they’ll discover stories of individuals embodying Christ-like virtues that illustrate God’s love in action. They will find space to wonder what it looks like for them to put on the all-purpose garment of love at camp, at home, and in the world. As God’s love weaves us together, strengthening us even when we feel worn down, campers can also name that wearing love has its challenges. Campers will practice how to share love sustainably and passionately. Through this journey, campers will come to understand their place in the tapestry of God’s love, a story that binds us all.

For campers, it will be a journey of discovery—coming to know that the God who created us also loves us deeply, setting us free from sin so that we can share that love with the world. Like the threads of a garment, God’s love strengthens and binds us together, especially when we feel weary. Through the Holy Spirit, we become part of the never-ending tapestry of God’s story—a story of love for us all.

Through Bible stories, creative activities, and interactive games, they will discover that God created them to be kind, humble, calm, and forgiving. Each day, they will experience different ways of “wearing love” as they see it in action among their friends and in the stories of the Bible. Over the course of the week, they have opportunities to:

• Recognize that love is central to our identity as children of God
• Explore how love empowers us to act in the world
• Reflect on how our love can bear witness to God’s work in the world
• Understand how love sustains us even when we feel weary
• See how love weaves us together into a community of believers

Each day we will explore a different aspect of wearing love:

• We wear love with kindness through acts of love, big and small.
• We wear love through humbleness by putting others before ourselves.
• We wear love through calmness by practicing self-care to build resilience and trust.
• We wear love through forgiveness by embracing the freedom to share God’s love in the world.

If you’d like to get in the camp spirit, sing this chant to the tune of Jingle Bells. We’ll be singing this a lot this summer:

Wear the love,
Wear the love
God picked out for you:
Kind and humble,
calm, steadfast.
Forgive each other too! (Hey!)