Summer Ozone: Experience Camp all YEAR!

For many of us the anticipation of summer brings about a wide variety of emotions. For instance, the excitement of family vacations, sports camps and weekend trips. Or the nerves experience of meeting new people or not keeping up with the people you already know. But the emotion that we all fear the most is boredom. Luckily, we at CWE365 have created a way for you to fight boredom and stay connected with us throughout the summer.

This summer we will be meeting every Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesday the north cities (Bentonville and Rodgers) will be meeting at the Metro Church from 6-8pm. On Thursdays the south cities (Springdale and Rodgers) will be meeting at the Jones Center from 6-8pm. These meeting will both be combined Primetime and Summit.  We will be studying a video series by Francis Chan called Surrender that will challenge all of us to evaluate our life and see what God is calling us to surrender. Summer Ozone has already begun and, with 2 weeks under it's belt, is keeping dozens of students connected to the relationships established at Camp War Eagle.

The Yearbook

Springdale

Yearbooks are a compendium of memories. Unforgettable memories of friends, inside jokes and achievements. Humbling memories of bad haircuts and funny wardrobe choices. With each turn of the page, the holder of the yearbook is reminded of the many reasons for growth that year. CWE365’s Yearbook event was a live look at the pages of Ozone’s yearbook, a reminder of the moments that have shaped us as a group and as individuals.

Ozone, our weekly club for middle, junior and high school students, originally grew out of the summertime relationships established at camp. Camp War Eagle started Ozone, to help campers earn their way back to CWE through community service and community involvement. 
This past year has been filled with parties, events, clubs and service. We’ve had retreats, sleepovers, competitions and Christmas parties. We have purchased countless passes to the drive-through zoo. We knew we wanted to take time to remember the memories from our year.

The Yearbook was an event, replacing year-end parties of past years with a singular goal: to reflect on how the campers have been supported and encouraged through Ozone. For most students the infectious, unavoidable fun the program delivers has given them some unforgettable memories with caring friends. For some, the memories may be of scholastic and life lessons from volunteers and directors. For others, Ozone has brought a year of personal development through lessons from the gospel of Luke and the life of Jesus.

Hosted at The Jones Center, Ozone's Yearbook event filled the front lawn with inflatables, coke floats, rubber kickballs, hot dogs, frisbees, face paint and dancing shoes. The "take your yearbook photo" attraction was hugely popular! In traditional camp style, students were encouraged to make their own fun in this free-form playground with the underlying goal of celebrating the memories created throughout the school year.

In addition to the bounce houses and hula-hoops, students crowded one station with a sign asking onlookers to “Sign the Yearbook.” There students wrote notes and reflections on index cards and posted these on canvas backdrops. Throughout the night, many of the over 150 students present left us written pieces of their memories (pictured below).

In this season, part of the Ozone staff is transitioning to camp, eager to meet new students and hang out with those who have become old friends. However, we still celebrate the blessing that the Ozone program has grown into, and the impact it’s having on the lives of students in northwest Arkansas, looking forward to. 

To get involved with Ozone in the summer time, check our calendar HERE! We have club for 6th-12th graders every week and fun, all ages family events throughout the summer.

Hillbilly Mud Run

This blog was written by Bentonville Ozone Director, Ellie Chase.

High School student and Leader participants

It’s not every weekend I find myself scrambling, on hands and knees, through the squashy, rich mud of an animal enclosure in Mulberry, Arkansas. And you better believe I don’t typically make a habit of stomping great distances through pastures, drenched in pond water and mud, my shoes creating a cacophony of water logged sounds at each step. But on April 27^th, these moments fit perfectly together in one common occasion.  The Hillbilly Pork-Chop Round Up 5k Mud Run set the stage for a day of muddy, messy, dripping, daring, hilarious fun for Ozone leaders and students.

As an Ozone staff, we love the chance to give students new challenges, fun experiences and opportunities to stretch themselves. A 3-mile run with muddy obstacles seemed like a fit for all three, I thought as I signed up high school students from Fayetteville, Rogers and Bentonville, as well as a few other leaders who were up for an adventure. The website promised a day of fun and excitement, yielding a face and feet full of the finest mud water could make and more. I was sold. Students were pumped. We could only imagine what was in store.

On the morning of the 27^th, we loaded our 15 passenger vans, dressed in old clothes just waiting mud, and headed south towards the small town of Mulberry and our soggy, smelly destiny. Hillbilly Trail Running, the organization behind the race, sets out to spread their brand of family fun around the region through several running events each year. For this race in particular, we came to discover they’d planned on hoisting us over rope net walls, barreling us down a slip and slide, through pigpens and into a barn filled with hay bales to climb, amongst other obstacles. Between the individual obstacles, there was running. Sometimes in creeks, other times in fields.

While running any distance is often perceived as a serious challenge, students took the opportunity to enjoy completely the race ahead of them. Messiness didn’t wait for the run to begin, as students jumped right in (quite literally) to the mud-fest. Baylea of Fayetteville, who was almost completely covered in mud before the race even began, made certain all her pals embraced the mud essence as well, “Just tackling people in the mud was a lot of fun. There was no point, no purpose to that really, just to have fun and be with one another, getting dirty… AWESOME.”

Running in races, on roads or trails, is a tradition that was passed to me by older members of my family, a tradition that has been carried out throughout the years, and one I have deeply enjoyed passing to Ozone students. There’s a goal to push oneself towards, and that is a wonderful place to teach young people from. Gia, of Fayetteville, was the youngest student to join us on the run, accomplished much during our event, “I’ve never run a 5k before, so that’s probably the longest I’ve ever run. It was cold and wet… but eventually I will do a race again.” Elyssa, of Bentonville, finished the race with excellence and expressed her growth from pushing herself throughout the event, “I was challenged because I’ve never run a 5k. I kept going even when I was tired and I felt like my legs could fall off. I kept going because at the end of it I knew there’d be the reward of having finished a 5k. I’m more eager to do races like this because I know I have that accomplishment of having finished.” 

We've got pictures!