So this past weekend was pretty fun. We had a youth retreat with a bunch of other churches and our group was the largest there (we had 20 kids). It was kinda funny cause the theme was "Your decision, your couple, your destiny". The ironic thing was how insanely this thing caused people to flirt and stuff. I mean I've been to my fair share of youth retreats in the States but they had nothing on this. But it was alot of fun. However, there was a downside. Since Ronald (the preacher) didn't stay but only dropped us off, he put a couple of us in charge. By some twist of fate, my name was the principle name as the leader for our group. I was all good with that until they called all the leaders together at the end of the first night. After the typical "Keep control, don't be too loud, blah, blah, blah" the dude starts appointing "rondas". I had a bad feeling about this, especially when I got assigned the 2-4 shift. After a clarifying question by another dude, "rondas" turns out to be guard duty where we walk the trails making sure there's no one out of the cabin who should be in or someone from the street who should be out. The most eventful that it got was chasing a dog away and eating a lemon, a mango, and a guayava. Boy was the next day running on fumes... A fun experience though was when at 12:30 all the guys cabins go to the girls side for "serenata" (serenade) which means they all sing some cheesy love song. Real funny. Also funny was how absolutely crazy all the girls went. All part of living with some crazy latino people.
I feel like I finally got to know some of the people in the youth group after such an eventful weekend. Only thing is that I only have three weeks left. Somewhat of a bummer. My main thing that I want to do is really encourage the group to be strong because there's not too much else I can do in a short time (not that I could do much with a lot of time). It's such an encouragement to see the excitement that people have about being a Christian. Last Sunday an older lady was baptized. Before getting in she was so giddy with excitement and when she came out of the water she was beaming. It was obviously the happiest day of her life. It was such an honor to be able to see that, not to mention real encouraging to me.
So there's a month left for me here. My prayer is that God will let this coming month be better than the last one. That I will learn all he has for me to learn and that he will teach me what it is to be his servant. That he will build up all those around me and that if I in any way can help, that I will.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think the main reason they were flirting so much is because their parents and other adults all tell them that they need to find novios/as in the church, but with such small youth groups most places that's really hard. So activities like the retreats are really good times to try to find that novio/a. I have a feeling that they're like that no matter what the theme is. I ended up having a conversation with Carol about it while we were there.
ReplyDelete