If you attend high school plays you may notice the costumes often look a little worn. The robes and crowns and evening gowns stored in trunks beneath the stage just don’t retain the sparkle that lit the stage for the first cast that wore them.

Caraway Conference Center and Camp wants to raise the curtain on a new act for the conference, camp and retreat center in the Uwharrie Mountains near Asheboro.  It’s a great production, but the costumes are looking a little worn.

For two years Director Jimmy Huffman has been slowly guiding and prodding studies toward a master plan for the 50 year old, 1,100 acre site. The current hotel building was built in 1975, and expanded in 1985. About 20,000 guests utilize Caraway Conference Center annually, but the capacity puts Caraway in what consultants call a “gray zone.”

Caraway’s bed capacity is too small for some of the larger groups that often inquire about its availability, but too large to operate without the staff minimum that it employs.

Huffman said 51 percent of the guests are North Carolina Baptists. So lots of other people help carry the freight to maintain the facility.

Caraway opened first as a camp for boys involved in Royal Ambassadors. N.C. Baptist Men (then the Brotherhood Department of the Baptist State Convention) led the effort to raise $750,000, find and buy land and develop a camp.

The first summer camp was held in 1963. North Carolina Baptists quickly saw that the large wooded tract in mid-state held wider potential and built a conference center.

Now the lady needs a face lift and expansion, and the Board agreed to let Huffman push ahead with a plan to raise funds and implement what he calls “a new view of a shared vision.”

He told the Board he’s studied every angle historically, ministerially, practically and realistically.

Ultimately, Huffman’s guiding principle is, “What can we do to reach people for Christ through Caraway,” he said. Then, very transparently, he said that after hearing reports about needs in Haiti and in metropolitan New York, he thought, “We don’t need anything.”

But he knows Caraway is the place where many people have come to Christ, where individuals and churches have found renewal and where much business of churches and of the State Convention has been accomplished.

New Board of Directors President Bobby Blanton will name a 7-person committee to lead from this point in organizing a campaign to raise $7.5 million for the first phase of expansion. Huffman wants to utilize the property “from corner to corner,” so some outdoor improvements also are online; such as a multi-purpose trail system, and conservation easements.

There will be destination sites in remote corners to allow youth groups or retreaters to get into the “wilderness” for non-distracted hours with God.

To accommodate larger groups and increase revenue, the plans include 20 new rooms, a 250-seat auditorium, welcome center and expanded kitchen and dining areas. It will include a remote cabin or two, or three with capacity of about 30 for churches to use for retreats.

In the camping area, the Bill Jackson outdoor chapel will be refurbished and the 20-year-old covered basketball court will be enclosed for year-round use.

Of course, this is a tough time to conduct a capital campaign. These dreams took root when money was not quite so tight. The job of a campaign committee will be to identify donors for whom this project catches their imagination unlike anything else. Board approval will allow Caraway to solicit North Carolina Baptist churches once annually for three years.

Board member Wayne Key asked if all possibilities for resources within the Baptist State Convention have been examined. He even asked if Hollifield Leadership Center in Conover is a “viable property that we need to keep?” He said he was on the board when the BSC purchased the facility in year 2000, but every priority needs to be examined in these times.

In April 180 students from Truman State University in Missouri will be on campus at Caraway for a week, working on the trail system, as a part of their community service.

This project has been evaluated longer and harder than Caleb who checked out the promised land. He said it could be taken, despite the giants. (Numbers 13:30)

"This is a God sized task," Huffman told the board. They decided to go with the goers. They hope to launch a three-year campaign by June.

Waiting in the airport baggage area for the first team of volunteers to return from their week on mercy mission in Haiti, you watch the escalator for the Rescue 24 uniforms to scroll down into view.

A local television news crew hovers, waiting for the same arrivals.

Uniformed businessmen in blue blazers and gray slacks or charcoal suits call their rides while walking importantly toward the door, dragging their laptop prams behind them. Moms back from visiting grandma squeal, kneel and embrace their kids while hubby hovers near honey for a peck on the cheek.

And I’m wondering what I can possibly ask the volunteers to tell me about their trip, so I can try to relate it to you, that won’t sound impossibly lame.

“How was it over there?”

“What did you do?”

A teenage girl plops hard next to me and calls her mom, telling her the flight is delayed. The luggage carousel starts up, but it doesn’t say “Philadelphia” above it so it’s not the one I’m waiting for yet.

“What left the biggest impression?”

“Did you save anyone?”

The loudspeaker squawks as the teenager talks and the businessman walks but I don’t listen. I never understand what they’re saying over that thing anyway.

“Were you safe or has the desperation for food and water put volunteers at risk?”

“Did you see any dead people?”

I’ve been following the world’s response to the Haitian disaster since an earthquake leveled the country Jan. 12. The scope of damage is beyond my ability to comprehend it.

Headlines say 110,000 already have been buried. That estimate is an easy lie to satisfy our hunger for numbers because if we can quantify it, we have some control. Insanity starts to make sense.

No one has a chance of really knowing how many have died or how many are buried when they haul bodies away in trucks to dump them like stumps from fallen trees after a hurricane in North Carolina.

It might take a day for a backhoe driver with a spotter to clear the rubble from a single house because they have to approach the task as if there are bodies inside. When a body is spotted – or struck – it is recovered, noted and bagged. But that process is far too slow when decaying bodies in the streets by the thousands provide the breeding ground for cholera that would make the death toll from the earthquake seem like that of a three-car wreck.

“What did you hear?”

“Did you smell death in the air?”

Bodies have to be removed, to be disposed of, covered with dirt and lime as if they cockroaches falling out of a cupboard in government housing after pest control sprayed for bugs.

Suddenly they are here, our proud volunteers; clean, weary, quiet. The TV crew pulls one aside to stand in the light and answer the questions I’d already rejected. I go to another and ask:

“Did you make a difference?”

In the 2007 movie The Great Debaters, based on a true story from 1935, a team of extraordinarily talented students from historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, debated their way through competitions with other black colleges until even the nation’s whitest white college and national debating champion Harvard took notice.

In real life, the ultimate debate came against the University of Southern California, but Harvard carried more movie drama.

Mel Tolson, the Wiley College debating team coach, played in the movie by Denzel Washington, constantly writes other schools to get them to debate his undefeated four-person squad. One of his team was a female whose goal was to be a lawyer. At the time, there were two practicing black female lawyers in all of Texas.

Higher education was segregated so interaction and debate between Wiley – a Methodist related school – and white universities had to overcome a lot of residual social mores. Credit Oklahoma City University with being the first white school to debate Wiley, although it insisted on holding the debate off campus.

When Harvard/USC accepted the challenge to debate Wiley College, it was big news. The debate was broadcast nationally “through the magic of radio” and there was an onsite audience of 1,100.  

An incident early in the competitive run up shaped the final debate in the movie. While on the road at night trying to find the turn toward Prairie View College, the Wiley College team was forced to stop when they came upon a lynchingby a white mob. A black man hung, burning, on a cross.

In the movie the team was chased by the mob as Tolson threw the car in reverse and escaped.

The final debate question was on the appropriateness of civil disobedience and the final debater from Wiley referenced the lynching experience. He quoted Augustine saying, "an unfair law is no law at all."

In response to the unfairness of Jim Crow laws and to the inhumanity of treatment by a white majority, the debater said he had the right, even the duty to respond either with violence or with civil disobedience.

“You should pray I choose the latter,” he said, ultimately winning the debate.

Monday is Martin Luther King day in America and each of us should thank God the black Baptist preacher advocated non-violent civil disobedience in his efforts to wring fairness from an American fabric soaked with racial discrimination, misunderstanding, fear and hatred.

What does it take to move a nation forward from two centuries of slavery; an evil institution that slave holders sometimes “justified” with the Bible? In the face of dogs, fire hoses, lynchings, murders and a white majority that felt it was losing its grip on the nation and the “way things always have been” King led the march toward progress as non-violently as he could.

His murder was tragic; his life heroic. This day to honor his memory and leadership is appropriate.

Most of you know the name Anne Frank, one of eight Dutch Jews who hid from Nazis for two years behind a false wall above an Amsterdam business before a traitor revealed their hiding place.

You know Anne Frank because of her diary, in which she wrote of the days she spent in voluntary captivity to avoid assignation to the death camps.

You know Anne Frank’s diary because of Miep Gies, an employee of Otto Frank who agreed to supply them food and essentials if they went into hiding.

Miep Gies, upon whom Jews bestowed the honorific “righteous Gentile,” died Jan. 11 at age 100 in a nursing home in Holland. She hurt her neck in a fall just before Christmas and did not recover.

Photo from Anne Frank House Miep Gies in 2006

Otto Frank published the diary in 1947 as Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex). The diary, which Anne had been given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. She died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated.  

Until she had a stroke at age 89 Gies tirelessly promoted causes of tolerance. She brushed aside any praise for helping the Frank family because she said she was only doing her part.

“So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press days before her 100th birthday last February. She did not want to be made a character study of heroism or to be lifted up as an extraordinary example.

If her actions are considered extraordinary or uncommon, she felt, common people would not feel compelled to action.

It was just her “human duty” to help when asked, she told schoolchildren in an online chat in 1997.

 When Otto Frank asked Gies in July 1942 to help them hide and to bring them food and supplies, she answered, “Yes, of course.”

“It seemed perfectly natural to me. I could help these people. They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn," she said years later.

By her reasoning, if such actions are considered extraordinary; if only heroes are expected to rise to a challenge, then challenges will go unmet because we are none heroes. She was herself, she said, just “an ordinary housewife and secretary.”

Do we excuse ourselves from uncommon action because we are not heroes? Miep Gies showed us that the embers of uncommon heroism glow within even the most common hearts.

Driving down rural Highway 64 Thursday I saw something very unusual for this part of the world: a pond iced over; completely covered with a thin sheet of ice.

While North America creaks in the throes of a cold snap rare in its intensity, sights like a frozen pond in North Carolina take me back to my childhood in Wisconsin. Ice on the farm pond on Highway 64 might have been thick enough to keep a bird from getting a drink of water, but it would never have supported me on skates with a hockey stick.

Every culture has rites of passage and one of them for me was opening my first pair of ice skates on a Christmas morning. I couldn’t wait to slip on my coat and boots, slosh through the snow, slide under the fence and slog over to the wide spot in the creek to teach myself to skate. How hard could it be?

My parents stayed in the warm house and simply urged me to be sure the ice was thick enough to support me and my sisters. Well, how thick is safe? How do I find out how thick it is? 

We took a trusty ax, chopped a hole near the edge and deemed it safe. After a few tentative steps toward the middle, then jumping up and down on it without falling through, we were certain.

Winter can be hard for some than others as this picture from Canada shows. See photo gallery.

I discovered it is very difficult to stand up on ice skates. But I eventually learned and later we frequented a much larger pond. Some winters it would snow during the first deep freeze, leaving the surface crunchy and worthless for skating.

On good years Dennis, Jay and I would shovel off a large area, tie magazines around our shins to guard them from whacking and play some hockey. Usually we were so tired from shoveling that the eventual hockey game was short. When other kids found a snow cleared patch of pond, they quickly gathered to take advantage of our labors, much to our resentment.

If it was really cold, we could take the tractor onto the ice with a blade to clear our hockey rink. One winter our neighbor took us onto the pond in his car. We drove around totally out of control – but relatively safe – sliding effortless and quietly across the flat, clear ice. It took some wheel spinning to build a little momentum, but not much effort to maintain it. Soft reeds on the edge of the pond kept us from banging the car into stumps or trees, in case you were wondering!

In the winter of the really big freeze, it was far too cold to be outside for other than emergencies. My dad drove a fuel truck then for the local farmer’s cooperative. Of course, people were running out of heating fuel faster than anticipated and way ahead of schedule. So dad suffered through enormously long days in -50 degree wind chill.

I’m amazed his truck would start in the mornings, but he kept it sheltered between sheds. Still, the engine screeched and complained when asked to turn over. Lubrication hardened in the oil pan, so metal rubbed metal briefly, creating the ruckus.

Temperatures like that freeze your nose hairs and your breath crystallizes into icicles on your mustache and eyebrows. It’s literally too cold to snow.

But when it did snow we pulled out the chains and wrapped them around the tires if we had to go somewhere. Snowplows shoved snow off the roads, filling up ditches. When the ditches were full snow blowers tossed the snow over the top.

On rare winters with very heavy snow, blown snow would create walls in areas of heavy drifts so that you felt you were driving through a tunnel. Approaching intersections was very tricky.

Of course the snow is always deeper in memory; the temperatures always colder; circumstances always more dire. My dad said when he was young he worked for a dairyman, who was too poor to afford a milk bucket. So dad had to ferry milk from the barn to the dairy one handful at a time; uphill; both ways.

I suspect our children will recall the 2010 freeze to their children in a manner that will elicit admiration for their sheer ability to survive.