Dear Friends

At this time of the year, we are receiving many family Christmas letters that give us a report on what has been happening with friends and family members in the past year. Some are very popular and fun to read, and others often bring messages about challenges and difficult issues that families have dealt with in the past twelve months. As a camp partner, this is our Trinity Pines Family Christmas letter.

In the Waitley family, our girls grew up with family decisions being made in Family Meetings. We made Kyra, our youngest daughter, the Vice President of the Waitley Family Corporation. Kyra would notify everyone of Family Meetings that were scheduled and what the topic was: family vacation, discipline, solving a problem, making an improvement, to name a few. In this Camp Monthly, I am calling a Family Meeting of the Trinity Pines Family to try and relate issues that need to be addressed.

Probably most of you reading this have raised children of your own or been around children you have watched grow up. As you observed, there are stages that a human being goes through from birth to young adult that bring about a variety of challenges and change.

Trinity Pines is much like a child. In 2000, the child was born. Our first camping season, we had very little development, we relied on lots of people to help make things happen with our limited resources and we made some mistakes. Then as we began to grow (just completing our 6^th season), we have begun to see changes and growth. Actually, we are only chronologically 6 years old, but in some ways we have advanced to our adolescent years.

I am not sure about you but for many people adolescent years were challenging and turbulent. I am sure many parents have wondered if we would live through the adolescent/teen years of raising a child.

I find Trinity Pines in the adolescent years for the following reasons:

1) We have grown/developed in some areas, but have limitations in others. An example is in our housing and program areas. While we have cottages, the Conference Center and now our first Quad and RV area coming online, in many ways we still have major limitations when it comes to size and accommodations for groups like Sr. Adults, couples retreats, etc.

2) While we have grown in housing, we have limitations in program areas. We are frequently asked about an indoor play area for winter and spring rentals – the answer: “we don’t have one”. It is hard to use the Conference Center for recreation beyond table games and some small group activities. Until we construct a gym, multipurpose area or pool, we are going to struggle to grow like we should.

3) Our income has not kept pace with our cost of doing business. The camp is located in a semi-remote location. In other words, everything we purchase or service we need has an “extra charge” because of location. We were aware of this at Victory Cove, but when we went to year-round camping, this cost only became larger. Then we have increased costs of doing business with the City of Cascade and there are many political issues that enter this discussion.

4) What about rentals? We are very fortunate we have had only 3-4 groups that have rented with us that have not been repeat business. While that is great news, we just simply need more rentals. Here again is where we are faced with limitation of size and program scope. In the spring of 2006, we were hit with group after group that would say the same thing: “the high cost of gas kept some of our participants from coming”. That impacted our bottom line of operation.

5) As we have grown, we are learning more and more how to do business – just like you learned how to raise your first child and hopefully made the mistakes with only that one and not the remainder of the siblings. Some of our mistakes and growth in knowledge have been:

a. Pastors and associates change. We are scheduling one year in advance in order to keep the calendar full. When a group rents with us, we turn right around and sign a new contract for the next year. However, we have had some issues where staff members change, therefore promotion is not the same and the returning size of the next year’s group is much smaller (impacting income) than the same group the year before.

b. As with events you might plan, weather, road conditions, price of gas and availability of funds can greatly enhance attendance. When attendance is impacted, our bottom line of income begins to erode.

c. When we consider pricing, we have to be competitive with other camping facilities in the area – while we think our service and facility is above the average, we must still be in the market. On January 1, 2007, all of our contracts will take a 10% increase. In our industry that is fairly substantial. But we have had to recover some ongoing price increases in labor, supplies, insurance and maintenance and repairs. Again back to our analogy of raising children. I am sure most of us found the adolescent years for a child more expensive than the early childhood years, for many of the same reasons. As an adolescent they ate more food, wore more clothes, and started to drive, thus impacting insurance.

From my vantage point, I know that we have tried to raise Trinity Pines with some of the same knowledge as we raised Victory Cove. However there are many factors that impact our ability to do business as we had for 70 years.

we are now a year-round camp facility, not just 3-4 months

we went from 4.3 acres to 198 acres

we went from volunteers and 3-6 people to a full-time staff with housing, insurance, utilities and wages

we used to prepare many meals from scratch, but now we purchase commercial food items that come with a higher cost

insurance costs continue to increase as we add more facilities

Tamarack Resort has impacted our wage for employees and availability. Throughout Cascade, you will see “help wanted” signs in many windows

The total camp budget for operations at this time is around $670,000 for the year. Over the past 6 years, we have seen this grow and increase and frankly, we have had a hard time getting our hands around a solid budget. Each year, we get more and more rentals, but there have been factors that impacted attendance so some groups fall short of their anticipated revenue for the rental. At the same time, we seem to be struggling with having enough records of what our food, consumable paper products (toilet tissue, garbage bags, etc) are for our growing and developing camp. Establishing a budget for Victory Cove was simple. We only had so much space, with so many facilities that held about the same number of people for the season of operation. Our only sticker shock at Victory Cove was the constantly rising rental fees paid to the State of Idaho.

The bottom line in this long story is that our kid (Trinity Pines) is taking more money to operate than we had anticipated, and we need some help to get through those adolescent years. In November, we initiated the Work a Day project. We are asking everyone to donate their wage or salary on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 to Camp Operations in hopes of closing the fiscal year in the black. It is difficult to have to rely on family members to help raise the child and meet these financial obligations. But, we are all part of the family and we know that we have a responsibility to be sure the child continues to grow and develop into something we can be proud of for years to come.

The Camps Board has been meeting with the Camp Finance Committee to discuss some of our options. We greatly appreciate your prayers and support as we meet this challenge. I believe once we are through the next couple of years of turbulent growth for Trinity Pines, we will emerge as a mature and well-developed camp with a proud heritage and a bright future.

From our initial appeal for support for Work a Day, we have had a total of $3,980 pledged or paid towards our goal of $50,000. The following is a list of those partners who have responded to our initial appeal. We are anxious to add your name to this list:

Stan Aubrey, Bev Balding, Mike & Barb Crevelt, Cal Dillabaugh, William & Lois Johnson, Gerald & Dorine Nichols, Dean & Sue Oberst, Lynn & Kathleen Pearson, Daylene Petersen, Don Renschler, William & Connie Russell, Rick & Dorita Waitley, Chuck & Lois Wilkes, Howard & Trude Thompson

The Camps Board met on December 2 and set fees for the 2007 summer camps. April 1 was established as the Early Bird Registration date. Registrations fees paid by that date will be at the same rate as the 2006 camp season. However, registrations received after the Early Bird date will have a $20.00 increase to the fee for that appropriate camp. We are currently working on new registration materials that should be in the churches and on our website after February 1.

This was a difficult letter to write to the Trinity Pines Family. No parents like to admit to the challenges of raising a child. We all want to appear cool, calm and collected and act like it is nothing to raise a child through the years of adolescence. Our Trinity Pines Prayer Partners have their work cut out for them as they bring these financial needs before the Lord.

Christmas is a blessed time of the year. As we read through the Christmas letters from friends and relatives we are blessed and challenged by what is printed on the page. I hope you are challenged in reading this family newsletter from Trinity Pines. Christmas 2006 will be different for many people who have passed across our property this past year. For many of them this will be the first Christmas that they truly understand the birth of the Christ child and what it means to be born again. Many of our guests have deposited burdens and heavy issues at our camp altars and left them behind. Christmas for them will be more free and less binding to issues in their past. While adolescence is a stage in life that we must pass through, thank heaven for young adulthood where the years seem to level out and maturity settles in.

May the Holiday Season and times with family and friends be very special to each of you and may 2007 bring great blessing and reward for your diligence and dedication to being part of the family of God.