The Answer Everyone Wants to Hear

A few weeks ago, I stepped outside to take a walk. As I was leaving my driveway, a neighbor and her daughter stopped me and asked, “Are you David Rogers?” I nodded, and the mother said, “My daughter, Emily, goes to youth camp. Are you going to have camp this summer?”

“Yes, we are!” I replied, and I wish you could have seen the smile on Emily’s face.

For a week, I couldn’t get her sweet smile out of my mind, so I went to their house and knocked on the door. Emily was a little surprised to see me.

I asked her straight up, “What’s behind that smile when you think of LLYC?”

It’s my happy place, she explained. I just love being there.

I get to see my camp friends from Houston, Austin, and what’s that town in West Texas? Oh yeah, Odessa.

Then she held up her phone. “And I can get away from this. It just feels so good when I’m at camp.”

I feel it, too! In that short conversation, Emily articulated the anchors of what programs are creating for our guests.

The H. E. Butt Foundation fosters beauty and relationships and reflection—and one of the main ways we do this is by extending hospitality. We welcome people—you!—to participate in God’s creation and God’s creative renewal of all things.

After this past year, so many of us miss the beauty of camp. Our staff misses sharing that beauty with campers and fostering a setting for relationships to flourish.

We talk about the anchors that guide our work internally: hospitality, beauty, relationships, and reflection.

When Emily smiles, she is missing her happy place. She misses how beautiful it is. She misses her friends, her relationships. She wants to get away from her phone and find space for reflection and presence. She nailed it!

She encouraged me that what we say we do for our guests, we actually do.

The Canyon is a beautiful space to be together and reflect, to receive and extend outrageous hospitality. We are all excited to welcome you to the Canyon very soon!

—David Rogers