What is Most Important to You? (300 Words Max.)

How does a person decide if what is most important is an event, some words of wisdom, an individual who touched his life, or a simple tradition? For me, it is a combination of these things that begins on Father’s Day when I join 130 of my closest friends for a week at Muscular Dystrophy Summer Camp.

We have our own reasons for returning year after year. Campers want a week where wheelchairs and leg braces are commonplace. I go to put the other fifty-one weeks into perspective. Every day of the year, I face situations that require humility, willingness to ask for help, sacrifice, and a desire to overcome. At camp my friends demonstrate how to answer yes through the examples they live out.

Throughout daily activities at camp I am reminded that the biggest barrier for people is the assumptions we make about them. Campers teach me how to recognize when I need help and more importantly how to accept it with grace, dignity, and occasionally a sense of humor. My friends whose diseases have no name show how to face uncertainty with courage. Volunteers challenge the conventional meaning of words like value and trust when I see how we must rely on each other to get through the week. Together, our physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional strength is taken to the breaking point, and as a result each of us grows stronger and wiser.

When the week ends, it is impossible to walk away unchanged. I leave with a refined definition of who I am, and what people are capable of. The memories and mementos of camp are my daily reminders of not only how to define words like strength, ability, and dignity, but also how to live them out every moment of every day.