Alejandro is the youth pastor in a church that is gradually returning to face-to-face activities, in times of the pandemic. He described to me how the group of young people who used to meet regularly disappeared. Now they need to start from scratch and they are in need of all kinds of support. It is right there where I saw the opportunity to offer him a help. I told him about the Workshop “A Day at Camp”, which I explained to him, consists of carrying out five recreational activities, guided by a theme that leads to exploring nature, starting early in the morning and ending in the late afternoon. In this way, I also achieved my goal of putting into practice my essay for the New Paths program of CCI AL. The topic to work on was Energy.

The long-awaited day arrived. The church is located in a mountainous area and has a beautiful extension of land, with large green areas, a small forest, nature trails, rustic ranches and a topography that invites adventure. Arriving that morning, I perceived a great latent energy in the 15 young people of both sexes between the ages of 11 and 16. Along with Alejandro, there were three collaborators from his team who would help us as facilitators, with the same load of “energy”. So we started giving way to the adventure within the fantasy of being “shipwrecked on an unknown island”. We moved forward guided by the energy activities plan to confirm that there was a lot of hunger for recreation, due to the social isolation imposed by the pandemic.

After just over an hour, the group was integrated and committed to achieving the necessary teamwork synergy to overcome the recreational challenges. The game –once again– as an extraordinary scenario in which God moves minds and hearts, wills and energies. The activities flowed until the end of the day, with a great accumulation of moments and immediate memories, due to a common factor: fraternal joy. We concluded by singing together, the song “Jesús is my everything” (Job González), to thank God for a wonderful day at camp. The notes of the evaluation carried out by the participants express the desire to

“to have a four-day camp” and “overcome more challenges together”. The leadership team conveyed their appreciation to me by commenting “how much they learned” and highly motivated to participate in the Expo Juegos, scheduled by CCI Costa Rica for next December. This is a synthesis, to give testimony of how God gave us the opportunity to support the youth ministry of a church, fill the need of the same young people to develop stimulating activities and mine as a writer of Nuevos Senderos.