I'm here!!! After a nine hour flight I finally arrived. Bob and Erin met me at the airport, was so so so good to see them. And of course the first thing we did ... go and eat Tex Mex! And the first thing we did when we got back to the new Patterson residence ... have people come over and eat dessert. No, not peach cobbler, but this pastry like thing Bob made. Will maybe attempt it when I come home if I can find some guinea pigs to try it out on!
Sunday was cool here and so busy. At both services I did the readings. We were looking at John 1v1-14 in the lead up to starting the 'Walk Across the Room' evangelism training programme next week. The God Rods that were one of the legacies from the summer performed with the most beautiful signing in it too. The young people had a Bible Study between the two services and Katy the leader of it really did some stuff that tied in with what I'm going to be sharing this week.
Bob and I met with a group of mothers and daughters to talk about baptism and what it means to be a Christian. We don't do that kind of thing, and so I was a little sceptical and thought it would be like bullying them into making decisions ... but I was wrong. Was such a beautiful and special time. The girls had loads of great questions and you could tell they've been thinking about whether they want to become Christians or not.
Sunday night we had the normal youth group Sunday Night Live, where we ate and I did the first session of my Livin' Loud programme. I looked at the life of Rachel Joy Scott, a girl killed in the Columbine High School shootings in 1999 and the kind of life she lived, and then we looked at who Timothy was in the Bible. The key verse for the week is 1 Tim 4v12, telling them not to let anyone look down on them because they're young but to set an example in how they live. To set up the rest of the week we looked at the key words of unimportant, instead, believers, example. Unimportant is pretty self explanitory, instead meant a change of something, one for another, believers was in the church before we even got outside to others and example was what we had to be. The rest of the week focuses in on the examples looking at speech, life, love, faith and purity. After we'd looked at them all, they had to spread out and write their own prayer for the week ahead and what they hoped would happen etc. Was such a good night, and really felt God's presence in it, such an answer to prayer.
Yesterday I was in schools, but at night I had the same youth as Sunday from the church and we went bowling. Was such a laugh! I won came second in my lane in the first game, and then first in a different lane for the second. In reality was just a great team building, fun activity where I could spent time talking and getting to know the young people more in an informal manner before we go on with all the discipleship weekend stuff. Tomorrow I have a session with them on speech, and I think relationships are stronger already because of things like hanging out on Sunday night and last night, so should be a great session.
No comments:
Post a Comment