The Christian Century

One summer when I was a children’s camp counselor at a Presbyterian camp in northern Indiana, I spent long days listening to what we counselors affectionately referred to as nonstop “wubbins questions.”

“Wubbins if I don’t know how to swim?”

“Wubbins if a bear comes into our cabin?”

By the end of the first month I could anticipate a wubbins before the child’s thought had fully formed. Unlike a “Why? Because I said so!” kind of exchange, there is no simple way to shut a wubbins down. And so, while other counselors guided their teenage charges through complex decisions of life and faith, I made sure that my little ones had brushed their teeth and changed their underwear—and I fielded dozens of nighttime wubbins questions.