Making Space for Gratitude
Liz Grenke-Leach in one of her favorite outdoor settings
Liz Grenke-Leach breathes gratitude and shares it freely. But in her role as a public middle school teacher, she was tired. Recently she had the unique opportunity to share Fortune Lake–this place she has long loved–with the students she serves, and it proved to be exactly what she–and they–needed.
7th grade is a tumultuous time. There is a lot of developmental change that is hard to understand, and young people and their peers can be hard on themselves and one another. Couple all that with a pandemic, the question of what “normal” school even looks like anymore, and it’s a real challenge. The recent commitment of Liz’s teaching team at Calumet’s Washington Middle School to prioritize school camp helped a group of 7th grade students to get out from the school walls and find their gratitude again.
On the first evening at Fortune Lake, one student was anxious about being away from home. She reached out to Liz,, and Liz invited her to go on a walk through the grounds. Daylight was waning, and they didn’t have a flashlight. Liz reassured her by saying, “Are you okay? I know every foot of these grounds.” The student replied, “I can tell you do.” Together they walked through the dark, together they breathed deeply, together they found calm. Eventually, the student was ready to re-enter the group. Although she and Liz had developed a bedtime plan, she didn’t end up needing it. At the end of the third day, she was so proud to have made it!
The pandemic has shown us that we all sometimes need an opportunity to re-center before we can sincerely re-enter the spaces to which we’ve been called. We all need someone to walk with us, someone who has tread this path before, to tell us it’s going to be okay. Through her experience at camp, Liz was reminded that we need to build time and space for gratitude, for ourselves and for our young people. Fortune Lake provided that opportunity, both for her and for the students she accompanied. Their teachers and our Fortune Lake staff could sense the students’ gratitude as they played field games, cleaned up after meals in the dining hall, learned how to jump off the dock for the first time (yes, even in October!), or learned three-part harmonies around the campfire. Their smiles–and Liz’s–said it all.
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