Utter Chaos!

Sunday night's program started off with a crazy game of "Chaos" where we divided up into four groups, each at a corner of the room. The object of the game was for each team to get to the opposite corner of the room at the same time. Needless to say it got nuttier as we had to change our form of locomotion each time: hopping, skipping, crawling, jumping, and twirling. After the game we joined the middle school and Christian Adventurer groups to hear Emma Jones and Rachel Levy talk about their experiences in the Peace Corp. They both volunteered to spend two years of their lives helping other people in other parts of the world. Rachel spent time in Peru and Emma in Tanzania. We got to hear local music, see clothes that the local's wore, and see pictures of the interesting people they encountered.

Fantastic Kick-Off!

We had a great kickoff night. We got to meet the new rising freshmen and a few new faces and got introduced to the theme for the year, "Thy Kingdom Come". Laura Jones led us as we first went outside to play a beach ball game. Each person got tossed the beach ball and had to answer one of the crazy questions written on the ball. After we learned a few wacky new facts about folks we went inside and used crayons, markers, and lots of old magazines to create on big mural paper what we thought the Kingdom of God looked like. After creating our first impression we talked about what we thought the Kingdom of God was like and what "Thy Kingdom Come" meant. We then returned to fresh mural paper and again did our best artistic impression of what we thought the Kingdom of God looked like. You can see some of our creations hanging in the youth room. This year looks to be fantastic fun!

Spring Roll (this is our Spring in a nutshell!)

Whoa! It's been a while since we entered anything on here. Spring tends to fly by and be so busy. Just a brief wrap up of our Spring events since last update:

• Terrific Youth Sunday! Melinda and Gair's planning and the kids' execution was very powerful and meaningful. We had comments like "best youth Sunday program ever" etc.
• Great "Fun Raiser" with the youth putting on a fantastic talent show. Wonderful BBQ thanks to the men of the church.
• Beach Trip - See Andy's note below:

We had a fantastic time at Topsail Beach on the Spring Retreat. This year's theme was "The Upside of Down Time" and we learned all about Sabbath. We learned why rest is important (and even a commandment from God). We stayed in a rockin' beach house that came complete with a pool table, ping pong table (on which Eric Fletcher dominated), an air hockey table, and a foosball table. We ate great food, colored awesome pictures, dove into cold water, relaxed ourselves from toe-to-head ("breath iiiinnnnn, breath ooooouuuut"), watched dog shows on TV, threw balls at each other while blindfolded, played competition twister, and even managed to get a few hours of sleep. Most braved the cold water to enjoy hopping over and under the waves. Many shells were collected and only a marginal amount of sand was brought back into the house to end up in our beds. No injuries were reported other than minor sunburns and near heart attacks when Andy showed us the finer points of running over things (curb check!).

Youth Sunday Planning

Twenty youth were present tonight for our first brainstorming session for Youth Sunday. We discussed the liturgical scriptures to glean their meaning and get ideas about what we should begin thinking about for their interpretation and for our theme. We learned that doing this is called exegesis. The scriptures for March 9th are:

• Ezekiel 37:1-14
• Psalm 130
• Romans 8:6-11

If you didn't make it tonight, don't worry, there is still plenty to plug in and do. We will go more in depth into our planning next week and really be defining the theme, laying out our program, and assigning our roles and to-dos.

Until next week!