Wednesday was a day of many miles and sights on our 2010 high school youth group trip.  We started the day in the dense fog of Berkeley which condensates on huge Redwood and Fir trees so that it seemed like rain under the trees but not out in the open.  A recent graduate of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, where we were staying, took us on a tour of the campus.  Jeremy is originally from Nebraska and had many cool and interesting things to share about the seminary.  We saw where three Redwood trees were planted in 1959 at the seminary’s founding.  We toured each of the historic and beautiful buildings.  We saw where a small group of students were slogging their way through a New Testament Greek test.  Jeremy smirked and laughed to himself as he thought about “summer Greek” which those students were taking.  Who knows?  Maybe some of the youth in our youth group will go to PLTS some day and be pastoral leaders in the Lutheran Church!

After we were all packed up and ready to go we drove to the Rose Garden park in Berkeley for a gnarly game of Ultimate Frisbee.  The competition was fierce, but we had a lot of fun, and enjoyed the cool air of the bay area.  We had a Bible study and talked about how God is both transcendent and immanent within creation.  What does this mean?  It means that as we seek to care for creation and have a spirituality that is connected to the environment, it is important to remember that creation is not totally absent from God, but that God is actually within creation too!  This is an immanent understanding of God.  However, as Christians we also believe that God is beyond and other than creation too, that is the transcendent nature of God.  How do we balance these two views of God?

As we went around the circle and shared personal experiences of encountering God in nature, there seemed to be a pattern that emerged.  Each person who shared said that when they saw or did something in nature that was very beautiful they thought of God and how God must have created.  It is ironic, and a good things I suppose, that spending time in nature and the environment did not lead people into idolatry (worshipping creation rather than creator), it actually directed our collective imagination to the one who is beyond all and creator of all.  This is good news!

We spent the rest of the afternoon on the road to Coloma and got to Earth Trek, our camp and river guides.  We swam and played in the river the rest of the day with a killer pizza dinner later on in town!

And now a shout out from KC:

This trip has been a definite highlight of my summer. I love San Francisco and that area, so staying there in Berkeley was awesome. CLU was really cool to see and then the seminary was amazing. Going on the tour with Jeremy was cool because of the weather and how it seemed like it was raining under the trees was pretty weird. Walking around the campus was really creepy but in a good way because of the fog around the buildings and the architecture of the campus. Wes said it looked like a monastery but in a good way! I really liked staying there because it was really homey in the inside. The kitchen was down below the living room so when we would do Bible study in the living room the room was heated through the floor. We are now just hanging around and Wes is beating Paul at ping pong. The river flowed all night and this morning I layed in bed and watched the sunrise. It was beautiful. Sam says HI MOM!