Faith, Fear, and FOMO

Now can we change into our jeans and go camping?

When we all went camping as kids, with my parents, we lugged heavy canvas tents, wooden tent poles, prickly ropes to pull things tight, and wooden tent pegs that had to be pounded into the ground. After everyone pitched in, erecting our “home” for the next week or two, Mom would check her list of meals planned and begin pulling food out; Dad tugged rocks to build a fireplace for a wood fire, built so that a metal grill could rest across the flames.

And we kids, released from the tent site to start the next task, bolted for the woods to gather dry branches, haul them back, and attack them with hatchets (supervised by Dad) to create a woodpile of right-size sticks ready for the evening.

Mom’s camping meals were American basic: hamburgers, hot dogs, one-pot macaroni and cheese, corn on the cob. Dessert? Almost always marshmallows roasted on green sticks over the glowing red-to-gray coals. There’s an art to toasting them perfectly golden, with the interior melty and hot — but also a wicked joy to letting your marshmallow catch fire instead, blowing out the blaze at the end of your stick, then tonguing the flaky black exterior as if you liked eating burned ashy sugar, to get to the gummy insides.

As the fire quieted, Mom lit the kerosene lamp. Out came a pack of cards, a notebook, or a book to read. You didn’t have to do any of those things, though: If you…