Act Five has been working with Coldwater Canada since our beginning. There is a shared love of the wilderness between our organizations, and beyond that, a shared desire to help grow resilience in the young people that pass through our programs. Jess McLean works as a Wilderness Instructor and Communications Coordinator for Coldwater Canada. She believes strongly in the growth that challenge can offer to a person. Here she shares a little bit of her own story with the wilderness and reflects on the necessity of challenge. If you have ever wondered why Act Five sends our students on long camping trips to the middle of nowhere, Jess’ words here offer an answer to that question.
“Education must enable young people to affect what they have recognized to be right, despite hardships, despite dangers, despite inner skepticism, despite boredom, despite mockery from the world or the emotions of the moment.”
Kurt Hahn, Founder of Outward Bound
Jess’ Story
“From as early as I can remember, the wilderness has been a significant part of my story. As a young girl, I remember the feeling of freedom as I rode my bike through a campground and swam in open lakes.
As a teenager, I took on bigger and longer adventures. I would venture out on canoe trips and always try to beat the accomplishments from the year before. There were longer portages. One trip portages. Longer distances paddled. More portages per day. More of this. Less of that. Every portage left me feeling more empowered, and every morning spent by a lake brought a new sense of clarity.
By the end of high school, I recognized the wilderness as a place of empowerment, freedom and clarity. I could not get enough time in the wilderness!
Wilderness Classrooms
Attraction to the wilderness is what eventually led me to develop the courage to go on an adventure with Coldwater Canada. Through that experience, I realized that the wilderness is much more than a ‘special place.’ It is a classroom where God develops our trust in Him and shapes us to be more like Jesus. This realization created breakthroughs in my understanding of my identity in Christ, and I developed a desire to see others experience God through wilderness adventure as well.
I then decided to be trained as a Wilderness Instructor in order to learn more about experiential learning and using the wilderness as a classroom. I soon realized that the element of ‘challenge’ in the wilderness is an intentional part of God’s design.
Pursuing Challenge
It does not take much life experience to recognize that challenge is an element of every person’s life–but there is a difference between the presence of and the pursuit of challenge. When we choose to intentionally pursue challenge, God develops necessary skills and traits in us for facing the challenges of life that we do not get to choose.
Over the past 3 years, I have had the privilege of leading 7 wilderness adventures for Act Five with Coldwater Canada. From hiking up steep ascents with heavy hiking backpacks in Virginia, to traversing through deep mud with a canoe on their shoulders in Temagami, to waking up on a cold morning in a quinzhee in central Ontario, I have seen Act Five students develop resiliency and strength through the pursuit of challenge.
This resiliency has carried each student past the mountain tops and valleys of the wilderness and into the depths of the learning and serving at 75 Blake St and beyond. I am confident that the students’ trust in God and confidence in their abilities developed in the wilderness gives them the courage to have difficult conversations and engage in new learning throughout their gap year program.
I am grateful to get to be a part of the deep impact Act Five sees in their student’s lives, and I look forward to seeing how God continues to use the wilderness to shape His people.”
