What can I say really? It indeed was a journey of happiness, being able to see old friends and make new friends during the four-day, three-night camp while getting away from the stresses of daily life and work.

This was my second time at WCCCLC and the happiness and peace that filled my soul during my first camp came back once again, except in a greater capacity. I guess part of it was me wanting to make myself a more outgoing person, so I ended up meeting and talking to a lot more people. Also, helping out with the camp helped quite a bit too. Being part of this year’s Promotion team let me meet various new faces and get to know them better as well. As well, assisting with the bus on the Hospitality team over at my home parish, SFX, which was used as a bus stop, got me to meet people and talk to them out of necessity.

Being a normally shy and quiet person, I never thought that I would have been able to be so outgoing. It really is nice to be able to meet new people and all that fun stuff and I found myself smiling and laughing all weekend. I guess I was just really really happy.

One of the quirks I had was the fact that the Taizé prayer was in the morning as opposed to evening. For those not familiar with Taizé, it is a form of prayer that focuses on reflection and reconciliation with God through music that highlights certain verses in scripture. I guess you can say that the atmosphere just was not there. But oh well, it’s something for the Core team to note for next year.

The theme this year was “Journey of Happiness: Attitude or Gratitude?” with Father Lucas Chan, a newly ordained Jesuit priest with interests in moral theology and scripture. Through the talks, he led us to discover happiness all around us. The first talk focused on finding happiness in suffering, or simply, finding happiness in anything, and slightly touched on what Christian happiness is. The second talk was focused on giving thanks and praising God in happy times and sad times. The final talk touched on the virtue of happiness, which basically has us being happy and sharing that with those around us.

It is interesting to have a second take on finding happiness in God. There are some overlapping things, such as the fruits of the Holy Spirit, but most of it is quite new in these respects. However, Fr. Chan’s talks were more scripture-based, given his interest in scripture, so we found ourselves flipping through our Bibles often.

For those who hear about camp from the promotion team: did you guys have fun? Would you come again next year? (if so, we in promotion have done our job well \o/ )

For those there at SFU, come join the SFU Chinese Catso group! (you know, the one Joseph Kwok talked about)

Back to work tomorrow, both at SFU for co-op and part-time contracting. Hopefully these experiences can help me develop myself so I would not be so afraid of speaking to groups of people, since I’ll be visiting high schools quite a bit for work to recruit for the SFU Computing Science program starting mid-September.