Matyas

“I’m going to KILL somebody!” Matyas erupts. NOT the reaction I, or anyone else, was expecting at having received his work assignment for the week. We’ve been given charge over a crew of 34 mostly teenage volunteers for the first week of camp. Cari and I are responsible for creating work schedules, assigning work areas, and overseeing that everyone is where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there. I wasn’t expecting this responsibility. I signed on for daily morning devotions, evening discipleship seminars, select mentoring relationships, and camp preaching. Apparently all those things will also be accompanied by a full-time supervisor position. It’s going to be an exhausting Summer.

Just a day before the start of camp I’m given a list of names of volunteers. We need to match these names to nine different work stations, create shifts and work schedules, and factor in various limitations that might be mentioned on the master list. I feel like this probably should have been accomplished by someone who actually knows the volunteers and the logistics of how the camp runs, sometime before today, the day before camp. But, what must be done, must be done. Cari and I do our best to blindly assign volunteers to positions, create timeframes for their work after some consultation with the full-time camp staff about what times jobs need to be accomplished and so forth. Note that the phrase “so forth” contains hours of tracking down various staff and individual meetings to find out exactly what they need help with and perhaps from who. 

We manage to create what appears to be a working schedule for the week. We print it and cut it so that each volunteer will receive a slip of paper with their work schedule for the week at our crew meeting tonight. 

At our crew meeting Van and Meli, our co-leaders will open with some icebreakers and organizational information. Van hands me the microphone to give a short devotional talk about our mission and vision for our service this week. These volunteers are the hands and feet of the camp. They will be doing all of the service required to keep the camp running: cooking the meals, housekeeping and cleaning, property and facility maintenance, security, media and tech, worship band, camp emcees and program facilitators etc. Aside from the program and emcee folks, who were previously selected by the camp director, everyone else will be working most of the time behind the scenes and in support roles. I give, what I think, to be a motivational and inspiring talk about what a privilege we have to serve this week and how God will use our efforts to glorify Himself and how numerous campers will undoubtedly experience salvation and spiritual rebirth this week. I offer some caveats about work assignments, how we may be doing things we didn’t envision or we don’t feel like we’re gifted at, but God will use our efforts with godly attitude above aptitude. Of course, I realize I’m talking to a room of teenagers, and many will indeed be disappointed because they did want this assignment and they didn’t want that assignment, or they wanted to work with such and such person but not with such and such person. All sentiments I understand, but had no omniscience to schedule around. But I think my little inspirational message from scripture should have done its work and preempted any strong objections.

After handing Matyas his fated slip of paper, I learn how wrongly I have overestimated the effect of my preaching. 

“I’m going to KILL somebody! I’m not kidding I WILL KILL SOMEONE! I can’t believe it! You put me in the kitchen? ARE YOU CRAZY?!!!” 

Another young man quickly puts his arm around Matyas’ shoulder, guides him away from our circle of chairs, and says something to him to try to calm him down. After some hushed banter back and forth, it seems Matyas has recomposed himself. I’m not quite sure what was said, but the death threats have ceased, and that seems like a good thing. 

In my little inspirational speech I emphasized that we would not be reassigning people just because they didn’t like the assignment they got, but I’m reconsidering that position now. I mean, maybe he had made some agreement with the camp director not to work in the kitchen or something before he arrived. I am working with very limited information after all. I approach a now more subdued Matyas and ask him about his work assignment,

“Hey Matyas, it seems like you’re really upset about working in the kitchen.”

“No man. It’s okay.”

“Are you sure? You seemed like you really didn’t want to do it. You were threatening to kill people.” 

“I’m not threatening to kill people. I’m telling you, if you put me in the kitchen I’m going to kill people. I don’t know how to cook.”

“Ahhh, I see. So you are afraid you’re going to poison us with your bad cooking or something?”

“Y-e-e-e-s,” he draws out the word while nodding his head and looks me in the eyes while opening his wider to make his point. “You don’t want me in the kitchen man. I’ll be really terrible at it.”

“I see. But you know you don’t have to know how to cook right? We have a chef. You just need to do what he says to help him. It will be fine.”

“Yeah, that’s what they just told me.”

“So you think you will handle it? I don’t need to reassign you?”

“No, no, I want to do it. I don't want a different job.”

“Oh. OK then.”

In the subsequent days I will have several odd conversations with Matyas. He operates on a little different wavelength. The way he expresses his thoughts and feelings and the topics he expresses them toward are, well, unique. But we do have a good discussion about brachycephalic dog breeds. He avoids and dodges any conversation I try to have with him about baseball, despite it being our mutual interest and he supposedly loves it. 

Matyas plays games on his phone during chapel sermons, has to be wrangled into most meetings, and is a bit…unruly. But he is also quick to smile and a hard worker. 

It’s Tuesday evening. Tonight the gospel will be preached and campers given the opportunity to respond. The gospel is preached. The invitation is given. Campers are encouraged to come forward if they made a decision to trust Christ.  As the keyboard plays the worship chorus in the background and camp director Honza calls on those who have been born again to come for prayer, several girls trickle to the front. A few more girls populate the aisle. A girl in front of me pulls on her friend’s elbow, and they both go up arm in arm. There are nine girls now standing in the front. No boys. I know that some boys have believed, but they are too shy to go. I think to myself, “If one boy goes, a bunch will follow. They just need someone to go first.” 

Out of the corner of my eye I catch some movement off stage to the left. It’s a young man making his way toward the front. He reaches the first row of chairs and stops, still in the shadows beyond the reach of the stage lights. He perches there to take in the scene, like an eagle on a lamppost. It’s Matyas. After some apparent deliberation, he straightens up, almost puffing out his chest, and walks to the front with a big smile on his face. He stands there to the left of the gaggle of girls who have come forward, exuding confidence. Immediately several boys pop out of their seats and join Matyas at the front of the room. Another boy stands up several rows in front of me. His friend rises in tandem. With borrowed courage, they go forward, arms draped around each other's shoulders. There are not as many boys as girls now, but there are some.

After the service I meet up with Matyas before our men’s discipleship time. 

“That was really good what you did in there Matyas. I was waiting for a boy to go forward so that other boys would follow, and then I saw you go up.” 

“Yes, I remember when I believed. I was so scared to go to the front. So I knew they needed help to be brave.” 

In a room with a couple dozen young and mature Christian men alike, a sixteen-year-old eccentric boy, who presumably falls into various special behavioral or emotional spectrum categories, would be the one to make the difference. Because he was so acquainted with his own fears, he was all the more willing to lend his courage to others. 

It was a common theme observed among the youth at camp this year; seeing those who had experienced various traumas support others in the midst of theirs. Young people who had endured failures, rallying around those who were falling. There is some intuited truth that those who have walked through valleys, see best others who are treading the same path, and are able to come alongside their fellow travelers with encouragement or help. Usually, as imperfect people, we need the experience ourselves to generate rightly ordered compassion. I’m prone to believe that this was the tenderness Jesus was able to extend to others that often eludes our own reach. As God incarnate, second Adam, he lacked no ability to empathize with every suffering sinner. As He bore the sins of all men, He would know all men. As the creator of all men, He would fully comprehend our experience.

So often those deep compassions we extend to one another as humans, are not human things as so many might claim, but rather divine things. They are the vestigial evidences that our corruption has not been so thorough as to root out every trace of God’s image. Instead, they defy the enemy’s disfiguring touch, and reflect a beauty declaring the glory of God Himself, tugging even the reprobate heart toward the transcendent. This Summer, one of those glorious glimpses came through Matyas.