September 10th Theme Intro

We had another great turnout last night of 24 kids! We introduced our theme for the year, which is "IM God, (through prayer) because I'm not God (and can't make it without him). The "IM" stands for Instant Messaging...for those who might not be up on the internet terminology. Our focus, will be on building a stronger relationship with God through emphasis on spending more time in prayer and specifically in praying from the heart, not just at meal times and bed time. We first played a communications game called "Buddylist/Caveman", in which we had to figure out without talking to each other which of 3 different stickers the advisors had placed on our backs. We introduced the acronym F-A-C-T-S, which stands for Feelings-Adoration-Confession-Thanksgiving-Supplication, and defines the different kinds of prayers that we commonly use. We followed up our theme discussion with another game, called "Circle of Prayer/Human Ring Toss" in which the teams (determined from the first game) held a relay race in tossing hula-hoops over a praying/kneeling team member. We had a little extra free time at the end, so we went outside for another silly relay race, called "Banana Olympics". We closed the meeting outside with Pow's and Wow's in which several youth expressed sadness about the tragic death on Saturday of one of their classmates, and some also have family members who have cancer or are now in hospice care. We will all be keeping these families in our prayers this week.