My Social Media-less Life

This post will be 1 of 3, for each day of Blimey Camp. These may just be story posts, or they may have a lesson… I may do one that is an overall lesson after these 3… we shall see…

This past weekend, I went to Tennessee to meet up with a bunch of other supporters of the YouTube channel, BlimeyCow, as well as those who ARE the channel, and their family. I’ve talked about them a bunch in the past (especially in my Survivor blog from earlier this summer), so I won’t go into a lot of detail about the channel or how much they mean to me… suffice it to say, I went to my third BlimeyCon and I am basically friends with them now.

I was surprised at how few people I had seen/met in person before from the two previous BlimeyCons I’ve been to, but the faces of who supports them has changed over the years, I suppose. But there were only three couples I recognized from the last BlimeyCons I’ve been to, so everyone else was basically new to me.

My friend from church, Amanda, went with me as well… I essentially roped her into it, but she likes adventuring and since it was more of a camp with a lot of “team building” style things to do, I knew she’d have a good time even without knowing anything about BlimeyCow. And she did, which is good.

On the way from Kansas City, we picked up a couple of Blimey friends nearby and took a roadtrip together. That was a stretching experience for me, but not in a bad way. I needed to get out of my comfort zone, and that was all this weekend was.

When we got to the campsite on Friday afternoon, we had time to just hang out and mingle with the others who had arrived. The fun didn’t start until after dinner when we had the welcome meeting that included a trivia game.

As soon as I met those in my group for the game, Jordan Taylor came over to talk with me and I contributed very little to the game from that point on. Since the online game of Survivor from this summer was such a core memory for us, we discussed that for a bit before moving onto other things.

“You’re playing volleyball with us tonight, right?” Jordan asked.

My gut response was to say no because I’m not that great at volleyball, but after talking about Survivor for the better part of a trivia game I was supposed to be involved in with the person who was now my friend (not to mention at least half of the reason I was there)… I really couldn’t say no.

Come to find out, no one playing volleyball that night was all that good AT volleyball. Not even Jordan. Watching us all kind of struggle through it together really helped me feel more at ease about how not-great I am.

Is that my own fault? Yes. I had plenty of opportunity to play volleyball years ago with the young adults group at church, but I never really felt comfortable playing with them because I felt like they were all judging me.

It feels weird to type that out because I know it’s not true… but that is how I felt.

I was kind of surprised I didn’t feel that way playing with a bunch of people I didn’t know, but maybe it’s the whole “doing things in front of strangers is easier than doing them in front of familiar people” idea. And I’m not even completely sure that’s true either… but it also doesn’t feel wrong.

Either way, my team did end up winning the last game of the night… not including the speedball-hybrid games we played in between the normal games. That was where most of my energy went, honestly. But I did have some good serves on that last game we won… those serves put us far enough ahead that we managed that win.

I was the second to last person to make it back to my cabin that night, but I savored every second of that nice, hot shower… and then felt bad for the fact that I had to climb up into a top bunk in the dead quiet cabin while at least 9 other people tried to sleep.

(I apologize to any of you if you happen to be reading this; I know I snore like crazy, but I hope I didn’t keep any of you up too much)

The first day of Blimey Camp was already over, but I had already done something outside of my comfort zone. Two somethings, really. I drove complete strangers 8 hours to a camp, and I played volleyball until we were done playing.

So I decided to do something else out of my comfort zone: I asked the Lord to wake me up in the morning and told Him He could wake me up whenever He wanted to.

Find out tomorrow if He did! 😉