This week, the camp we've been hosting is using a theme that recalled to me a metaphor that's been knocking around in my head for years. I think it finds its origin in the Animorphs books I adored when I was younger, which featured six kids who, from some good aliens, receive the ability to change into animals, constantly using their newfound powers to save the world from some bad aliens in each installment. My best friend Grace loaned the series to me in third grade, and, fancying ourselves as the two girl characters during recess that year, we found some boys who could complete the group. We maintained our Animorphs club for the next two years, which made an excellent excuse to hang out with boys our age.

The whole becoming animals thing appealed to me, but more than that, I was struck in my nine-year-old way at the parallels I found between Christianity and the view of the universe that the books purported. At one point, a wise godlike figure gives one character an elevated glimpse of time, telling her that all lives are like charged, intertwining cables streaking through a vast expanse. When they intersect, we find ourselves in the same place and time as others. The picture stuck with me. The idea that everyone's life is its own endless string winding its way through the world enchanted me.

And so the theme of this week's camp is "Storyline." By focusing on the story that our lives ultimately are, the directors hope to give their campers a sense of the omnipresent authorial hand God has in the plot that our lives follow. To symbolize this concept, they suspended a concrete version of that metaphor that delighted me as a child: multicolored strings spanning the length of the tabernacle, caught together in a clear tube that is this week together, before stretching out in all directions, towards the future.