Leave it at the Gate
Jon Frano and Rob Taillon with Angela Prusia
Leave it at the gate. Whatever you have going on outside this camp, just leave it at the gate.
Jon Frano, T.R.A.C. director in Erie, Pennsylvania, heard these words from God almost three years ago.
He shared how when God gave him this word, he thought the message was just for him. “I had a lot going on, but when I was praying one night, I heard God say, ‘That message wasn’t just for you.’”
So, last year, Jon shared the same message with the staff and volunteers at T.R.A.C. Erie the night before campers arrived for boys’ camp. The trainees at National Leadership Training also participated.
“All of us have differences of opinion, but that doesn’t matter,” Jon said. “The most important thing is that you’re the best person you can possibly be for these kids. They’ve gone through things we can’t even imagine. They deserve our best.”
He went further on to say, “In fact, I think the message isn’t just for us staff; it’s what we all need to hear. Our campers deserve it the most. Everything that’s going on in their lives, these kids just need to leave it at the gate.”
The camp property has a gate that is locked every night, so Jon directed everyone to take a walk to the gate.
“We’re going to leave all the crap behind and give the best of ourselves to these teens,” Jon told us. “Come on. Let’s take a walk to the gate.”
Once there, we each took a sticky note and had a conversation with God. Around us, the birds sang while we wrote down whatever we wanted to leave outside the gate.
The whole experience was powerful, and one that would be a great message the night before campers arrive for every T.R.A.C. across the country.
The next day, Rob Taillon, National Challenge Course Trainer, shared a devotion with the trainees at National Leadership Training. “God wrecked me last night with Jon’s message.”
He admitted needing to leave behind a lot at the gate—challenges at their local T.R.A.C., including changes to the sponsoring church, challenging team dynamics, an extra tough group of campers, and hard things facing a close friend.
“These things haven’t disappeared, but I slept having peace.”
When Rob opened his Bible in the morning, guess what verse God highlighted?
Matthew 7:13a: “You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate.”
Commentary further stated: “How narrow is the gate that leads to life. Mistakenly I think we’ve come to believe this is about restriction. The way is narrow, but really Jesus wants us to see that narrowness is the way. It’s about funneling ourselves into a central place. Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about entering into the expansive. There is a vastness in knowing you’re a son or daughter worth having. We see our plenitudes and God’s own expansive view of us.”
Wow. Don’t you love it when God speaks?
As Rob said to the trainees, “We need to show our campers that we see them as God sees them, as a son or daughter who’s actually worth having.”
Then he quoted Gregory Boyle, author of Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.
You stand with the demonized, so the demonizing will stop. And you stand with the disposable, so the day will come when we stop throwing people away. And we stand with those whose dignity has been denied. And we stand with those whose burdens are more than they can bear. And you stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. And you make those voices heard.
Why do we say yes? Why do we continue to come back year after year to do this?
The hours are long. The preparation is grueling. There are vacations we could take. There’s time with our family that we sacrifice. And yet we come back again and again.
Let’s leave it all at the gate . . . and let God show campers a love that is so high and so wide and so deep and so expansive, that we can’t help but stand “with those whose burdens are more than they can bear . . . the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. And make those voices heard.”
