Emmanuel—The God Who Lives With Us

When I was a young girl, we attended camp meeting every summer. Although you could rent motel-like rooms or bring your travel trailer, we always stayed in “tent city,” a large village of tents that appeared every year like overnight mushrooms and lasted for exactly 14 days. It was an instant neighborhood filled with people who belonged to the same church we did.

The tents were the same size and color and organized neatly in rows by numbers and letters. We never knew until we arrived whether we’d be in S-13 or D-2, or some other combination. Discovering who our neighbors were or to what tent our friends or relatives had been assigned was a favorite camp meeting pastime. Upon arrival, we made a beeline for the information booth and began looking up names and tent addresses in the camp directory.

Tent city engendered a sense of community unlike anything