A Light in the Pines

School is out, and Dad, Allison, and Ana head up into the pines for Junior Camp — a week of cabins and campfires, of cold mornings and the smell of pancakes on the wind. Allison arrives with a binder and a plan, ready to run the tidiest cabin at camp. But when a quiet new girl named Abigale appears in the doorway of Cabin Seven — knowing no one, unsure of every song and every routine — Allison discovers that the most important thing at camp is not the thing she prepared for. Through Ana’s effortless, headlong friendliness, Sister Beverly’s quiet example, and a campfire message from Brother Alexander, the Jones girls learn that you are never too young to be a light — and that sometimes the brightest thing a child can do is simply make room for one more. Scripture: 1 Timothy 4:12; Matthew 5:16 (KJV).

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SPEAKER_00 1:19

Welcome to the Jones Family Chronicles. For life at school, home, and church is always full of lessons, laughter and love. Meet Dad, the pastor's assistant, mom, the heart of the home, and their five bright and lively kids. Allison, Addison, Anna, Ava Grace, and little Andy, who somehow always managed to turn ordinary days into extraordinary adventures. So gather round, open your heart, and let's discover together the joy of faith, family, and the timeless truths of God's Word. This is the Jones Family Chronicles. All right, kids, get a close. Papa has a story for you about your favorite family, the Joneses. It was the middle of summer, hot and green and long when the church held its junior camp. A whole week up in the pines for the younger children, with cabins and campfires and so much dust it made you gasp and laugh at the very same time. Dad was going along as one of the camp leaders the way the pastor's assistant usually did. And this year both Alison and Anna were with him. Alison began packing four days early. She had a list, naturally. She had in fact the binder, the one that went most places Alison went, and inside it, in her careful hand was a schedule of the week as she imagined it. A checklist of everything a person could conceivably need in the pines, and a small hand drawn map of a cabin she had never laid eyes on, with the bunks already assigned in pencil. Alison did not go anywhere without a plan, and she saw no reason to start now. Anna packed in something like four minutes, most of which she spent talking about it. On the morning they left, the whole family came out to the porch to see them off. Mom checked the bags one more time. Ava Grace hugged Anna around the middle and very seriously said Be a good friend up there. Which was a five year old's entire theology of camp, and as it turned out, not very far off. And Andy toddled to the top of the steps, waving both arms and shouting the one word that covered all goodbyes Happy. Then the car climbed up and up into the pines, the air going cooler and sweeter and sharper with every mile, until the trees closed in tall and green overhead, and a wooden sign appeared at the end of a dirt lane, Junior Camp Welcome. Camp smelled like pine sap and wood smoke and somewhere pancakes, and it sounded like a hundred children who had just been let out of doors. There was a wide wooden tabernacle with open sides where the meetings would be held, and a bell on a post that seemed to ring for very nearly everything. Anna was out of the car before it had entirely stopped. The girls' cabins sat in a row along the tree line, and Alison and Anna were assigned to cabin seven. Alison was, frankly, in her element. Within ten minutes of arriving, she had chosen her bunk, made it up with hospital corners, and begun gently, helpfully, and entirely without being asked, to suggest to the other girls where their things might go. She had a plan for the shelf, she had a plan for the shoes. She had very nearly a plan for the plans. Sister Beverly was there too, helping to settle the girls' cabin for the week. She and Brother Thompson had both come up to volunteer, he with the boys and dad, she with the little ones. She watched Alison arranging the cabin with a small knowing smile and said nothing at all. Only moved quietly through the room the way she always did, straighten a blanket here, learning a name there. Anna, for her part, had already made three friends and lost one shoe. It was nearly supper when the last camper arrived. She arrived in the doorway of cabin seven with a duffel bag too big for her, and a look on her face that Alison would remember for a long time afterward. The particular look of a person who has walked into a room where everyone already seems to know everyone, and is not at all sure there is space for one more. Her name, they would learn, was Abigail. Sister Ward brought her, and Sister Ward went to the church. Abigail did not, or at least not yet. It was her first time to camp. It was, Alison would come to realize, her first time at very much any of this at all. Abigail stood in the doorway and did not come in. Alison noticed her. Alison noticed most things, and Alison being Alison, knew exactly what to do. She found Abigail an open bunk. She offered her a copy of the cabin schedule. She explained kindly and efficiently where the bathrooms were, and when the bell would ring and what the plan was for the evening. It was all correct, it was all helpful. And somehow, when Alison finished, Abigail was still standing a little apart, holding her schedule like a girl holding a map to a country she had not quite been invited to. Sister Beverly saw it before anyone. She crossed the cabin without any fuss at all, sat down on the edge of Abigail's bunk as though she had all the time in the world, and simply began to talk to her. Not about the schedule, not about the rules, just about Abigail. Where she was from, whether she liked the pines. Alison watched and felt, for reasons she couldn't yet put a name to, that she had done something almost right and missed the real thing by an inch. What Anna did, she did without thinking about it at all. Anna came barreling back into the cabin, looking for her lost shoe, spotted a girl she had never seen before, and changed course like a small warm comet. Hi, I'm Anna, she announced, arriving at speed. Who are you? Is this your bug? Do you want the top or the bottom? Because I'll take whichever one you don't. Have you seen a shoe? It's mine. Do you like marshmallows? There's a campfire. Come on, you can sit with us. Abigail blinked at this small flood of a person, and then, almost against her will, the way you sometimes just can't help it, she smiled. Abigail, she said. I'm Abigail. Okay, Abigail, Anna said, as if that settled the entire matter, and took her by the hand and towed her out toward the noise and the pines and the rest of the week. Alison stood in the middle of her beautifully organized cabin and watched her little sister do. In about nine seconds, and with no plan whatsoever, the one thing Alison had been trying and failing to do with a schedule and a map. And a small, uncomfortable, honest thought arrived and would not leave. I was running the cabin. Anna was making a friend. That night the whole camp gathered around the big fire, the sparks going up into the sky thick, with more stars than the children ever saw at home, and Brother Alexander stood up to speak. Brother Alexander was the kind of preacher who talked to children as though they were people, which of course they were. He did not talk down and he did not talk over. That night he talked about being young. There are some of you here, he said, who think you have to wait to matter. You think you have to be grown or tall or in charge before you can do anything for the Lord. He shook his head slowly. Listen to what the Bible says. Let no man despise thy youth, but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity. An example, Brother Alexander said, not someday, now. At eleven years old, at seven, right here in the pines. Then he read something else and the fire popped and settled as he did. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven. You want to know what your light looks like? he asked. It doesn't have to be big. Most of the time it isn't. Sometimes the brightest light a young person can shine, the very one heaven notices, is looking around a room, finding the one nobody is talking to, and making room for them. He let that sit a moment. The Lord himself said it plain. I was a stranger, and ye took me in. Across the circle, Alison found Abigail's face in the firelight, sitting close to Anna now, but still new to all of it, still catching the song's half a beat behind everyone else. And something in Alison went quiet and certain. The next morning the whole camp went up to the lookout. It was the kind of thing that you needed a buddy for, a long climb through the pines to a bald rock at the top where they said you could see three counties at once. Everyone, find a partner, called the counselor, and all around Allison the camp sorted itself in an instant into pairs the way children do. Alison had, in fact, been looking forward to this. There was a girl named Bethany, she only ever saw at camp once a year, and the two of them had already found each other and half planned to climb together. Bethany was easy and familiar and fun. It would have been a good morning. But when Alison turned to say so she saw Abigail. Abigail was standing at the edge of the group again, the way she stood in the doorway, watching the pairs form up around her and not being chosen by any of them. Her face doing that careful thing it did when it was trying very hard not to mind. Alison thought about the fire, about the light that finds the one nobody is talking to. And she made a small choice that cost her something, which is the only kind of choice that counts for very much. Abigail, she said, walking over, will you be my buddy? Abigail looked up, surprised the way she had been surprised the first time Anna spoke to her. I don't I don't really know how to. I've I've never hiked before, she said. That's okay, Alison said. We'll go slow. I like slow. She did not, particularly, but she found walking up through the pines at Abigail's pace, stopping when Abigail stopped, listening while Abigail slowly unfolded about her family, about her house, and how she hadn't wanted to come at all. That slow was its own kind of good. She was not organizing anything, she was not in charge of anything. She was simply there, next to someone who had needed a someone. It turned out to be the best morning of the whole week. At the top where the trees fell away and three counties really did spread out blue and hazy below, Abigail stood at the very edge of the rock and looked and looked and did not say anything for a long while. Then she said quietly, I've never seen this far. And Alison, standing beside her, thought that was about the truest thing anybody had said all week. By the last night Abigail knew the songs. That was the thing Alison noticed first. At the final campfire that the girl who had come in a beat behind everyone was singing right along now, all the way in, her whole face lit orange and gold by the fire. Somewhere in that week Abigail had stopped standing in doorways. She sat wedged happily between Anna and Alison as though she had always been there. Pickles, had Pickles been allowed at camp, would surely have wedged himself in too. When the singing quieted, Abigail leaned over to Alison. I didn't want to come, she said, in the honest way people tell you things by firelight. But Sister Ward asked me. I cried in the car. She was quiet for a moment. Can I come to your church sometime when we get back home? Yeah, Alison said, and had to work a little to keep her voice steady. Yeah, you can sit with us. Off across the fire, Alison could see Dad and Brother Thompson stacking wood for the morning, and Sister Beverly with an arm around a homesick little camper, and she understood in a way she hadn't at the start of the week, that all of it was the same thing making room. It was what her whole family seemed to be for. She had come to camp to run the best camp in the pines The best cabin in the pines. But she was going home having learned that the best thing in that cabin, in that camp had never been that cabin at all. She didn't know anybody, Anna said later in the dark of cabin seven, summing up the entire week in the way only Anna could. And now she knows us. And that's the whole thing. They came down out of the pines on a Saturday, sunburned and pine smelling and talked completely out. And the whole way home Anna narrated the week while Alison mostly looked out the window, turning something over quietly the way she did. That evening she told the whole of it to Mom, the cabin and the campfire and Brother Alexander, and the girl named Abigail, who had stood in the doorway and by the last night had asked to come to church. Mom listened to every bit of it. You know, she said when she had finished, people spend their whole lives thinking they have to become something big before they can do something good. And here you go up into the pines and find out the truth of it at eleven years old. She smiled. The light that matters most is usually just the one that scoots over and makes room. Alison thought about her binder still packed away with its schedule and its penciled map of a cabin that had turned out to hold something no plan could ever have arranged for. She decided she would keep the map anyway. Some week she want to remember exactly. Ava Grace, who had missed her sisters all week, considered this from the floor. That's what I said, she pointed out, be a good friend. And she had, in fact, said exactly that. And he climbed up into Alison's lap, well pleased to have his whole family in one place again and offered her the highest honor he knew how to give. Drums, he said, and handed her a drumstick. Addison looked around at all of them. Gathered close in the lamplight, everyone was home again and whole. Addison knew she would like Abigail. And she knew Abigail would like Jesus. Now, who's ready for brownies?