TBC Youth Group

It was a fairly quiet night. We simply rented a movie—The Simpsons Movie—and stayed at the church to watch it. Pizza was ordered, and a church member had also provided some chips and cookies to snack on.

Unfortunately, David wrote this post, but he was ordering the pizza while John was doing the devotion, so he doesn’t have details about the devotion to include here.

There was a lot of confusion between the Youth Group and the Urban Promise YMAD group, who were meeting at the same time. Some of the boys simply went to each group as they wished—meaning that they did their best to avoid going to any of the devotions. It was decided that the Youth Group and YMAD leadership need to meet, to discuss how to handle this situation. We’re planning to meet on Tuesday.

We had two things going against us, this week: It was March Break, so we’d have less kids than usual, and it was a youth rally, which the kids wouldn’t think they’d enjoy. (We say that they “wouldn’t think” that they’d enjoy it, because we’d been to a youth rally before, and they’d all enjoyed it very much.) David had a brief conversation about this with Shawn, from Urban Promise; how do you get kids excited in the LORD? If they’re only coming out for things like roller skating, and not for things like youth rallies, doesn’t that mean that you’re doing something wrong? Unfortunately, they didn’t really come to a conclusion. (Other Youth Group leaders, feel free to leave comments…) All David could come up with is that your best bet is for the leaders to be excited about the LORD, so that they can lead the kids toward Him. (If the leaders aren’t excited, how can they expect the kids to get excited?)

So, because of all of this, we had fewer kids than normal, and—as is very not usual for us—way more seats than kids, in all of the various cars we’d brought. So we let John go home, since he wasn’t feeling well, and also let Stephen go home, because he needed some sleep.

The rally itself was good. We’d gone to one before, put on by the same people, so we knew that it would be pretty good.

Stephen’s profile coming soon…

We had planned to go roller skating the week before, but had had to cancel because of the weather. So we decided to go this Friday—assuming that the weather would cooperate. If it didn’t, we’d have a games night. Unfortunately, about 3:00, it started to snow, and the weather reports were starting to predict a lot of snow.

The decision to go or not go often falls to David, so he got a call on his cell phone around 4:00; “Are we still going?” David indicated that he wasn’t sure, but that he was currently leaning toward going. And then, as he was driving, his car started sliding around the road, and he decided that we probably wouldn’t go. And then he talked to Odele, around 5:00, and Odele said that no, the roads aren’t that bad, we should be able to go. Long story short[ish], Odele managed to talk David into going, which was good, because we all had a good time.

Aside from the drama at the beginning, as to whether we’d go or not, it was a pretty normal night. John has decided that his devotions are going to go through the Old Testament, and, appropriately enough, he started off with a story from Genesis, and showed the kids the first mention of Jesus in the Old Testament, in Genesis 3. And then, as is also normal for our group, we had too many kids and too few seats.

The actual roller skating itself was great. We all love roller skating—especially Odele—so it’s a guaranteed good time.

P.S. We also introduced a new leader this week: Stephen.

Unfortunately, we had to do it again: Youth Group was cancelled, because of snow. And it’s really unfortunate, because we were planning to go roller skating.

Because there wasn’t much advance notice about the snow, the night was cancelled at the last minute. (David had actually known, ahead of time, that it was supposed to snow—he just didn’t realize how much it was going to snow.) So, because there was a chance that some kids wouldn’t get the message, both David and Odele showed up to the church, in case any kids came. There were a few guys there, so we joined with Urban Promise for devotion, and then Odele stayed and played basketball with the guys, and David went home.

We’re planning to try again next week.

Unfortunately, David wasn’t available this night, and David writes these blog posts, so there’s not much to say about this one. We were meeting up with the other Youth Groups that we’d met with before. The group was going to watch Spiderman 3, and then the devotion was going to be based on the movie. (The idea was to compare Venom with sin—that sin tends to envelope us the way that the dark suit enveloped Peter Parker in the movie. Note that David hadn’t seen Spiderman 3, when he wrote this post, so he might have screwed that up.)