More Than Flowers

“Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.” - Romans 2:10

Calvin Crest is home to many incredible stories of transformation, rebirth, and love. Not only is it a place where God’s love is shown and given freely, but it is also a place where many couples have met and forged lifetime bonds, marriages, and family legacies. Such was the case for past alumni staffers Mark and Cheryl Haggard, when they met while both working the summer of 1988 at Calvin Crest.

This Valentine’s Day, Mark wanted to give his wife of 33 years a different kind of gift, something a little more “scent-imental” than the standard flowers and chocolates.

“We moved to Idaho in 2004 and, outside of your website, we have not seen Calvin Crest in twenty-five years,” Mark says.

“For Valentine’s Day, I want to give my wife something incredible – smell, the most important sense in creating memories. I want my wife to put her nose in the jar, close her eyes, and be taken back thirty years.”

Our staff got to work to make this sweet Valentine’s Day request a reality by gathering Incense Cedar, Manzanita, Sequoia, and Lichen in a jar right from Sherwood Forest, where it all began for Mark and Cheryl.
“The summer of 1988 changed my life, and it wasn’t the daily trips to Oakhurst,” Mark says while reminiscing of his time working at camp as the Town Driver that summer. Two years later, Mark and Cheryl got married; then in 1997, they welcomed their first son, ‘Calvin.’

“We believe very much in camping ministry,” Mark says. “After our move to Idaho, we made sure that our kids got the same opportunity that we did, to get away from city life and enjoy the outdoors, and to find God in the process. But if we let him, God finds us. And over eleven weeks in 1988, God gifted me a friend and helpmate that will be my Valentine for the rest of our lives.”

Cheryl and Mark at Calvin Crest.