Meet Sam:

For the past decade, experiential educator, author and speaker Sam Van Eman has taught in barns and board rooms, forests and canyons , classrooms and auditoriums. ” Sam works as a Staff Resource Specialist with the Coalition for Christian Outreach and enjoys partnering with his wife to raise two daughters.

Why after 10 years of professional trip leading, do I continue packing my sleeping bag and lacing up my boots to lead students I have never met into places they may have never gone before?

Because in the Backcountry, a student is likely to…

Exhale to squeeze through tiny tight spaces, or gasp at the wonder of wide open places. Consider the past and the good way to healing, or lie on the bottom and wish he had feeling. Think about dinner in 12 cold degrees or ward off the bugs but dream of Febreze. Frolic with friends in marvelous roots, or wade through the muck with only half-decent boots. Experiment with make shifted Indian cuisine, or cause you to wonder, was this an accident scene? Search for Spiritual signposts of reference, or delight in uncanny places of reverence.

Leading Trips in every condition with every kind of student has not only been deeply wonderful, but it has also made me acutely aware of one thing:
Suspending the normal reality for students by transporting them away from their daily comforts opens the doors for transformative learning to occur.

Suspending normal is as simple as replacing self-serving cafeteria lines and big tables in a clean environment with a bag of ingredients, a four inch stove and the forest floor. Add in a cold layer of snowflakes and a pinch of darkness, and voila! Mealtime is brand new, requiring interdependence. Suspending the normal means replacing the i-pod with silence, homework with play, and wrist watches with listening to the natural cycles of hunger and sleep. Furthermore, it means removing the distractions that keep many of them from dealing with the essential questions about life and faith.
This is the heart of it for me. Students frequently say that God is more easily found in nature than other places (even if they aren’t sure there IS a GOD), as through being outdoors were his living room where they feel comfortable sitting. For so many, their internal questions converge with the activities and experience and conversations on a trip and they begin to respond to Christ’s invitation, “Come, all who are thirsty….” What a privilege it is to watch them grapple with this first-hand.