Crazy Weekend!

We had a very busy weekend in our youth ministry!  There were lots of things planned.  Friday night, a Mudbugs minor league hockey game.  Saturday morning was a Serve! day.  Sunday was supposed to be PACKED, with Sunday School, Worship, Youth Band, Discipleship, and a Mentor meeting for those mentors in the Leadership Track.

Reese, serenading the back of a women's head

Well, the Mudbugs game was great.  We took 45 students and adults to the game.  We had a blast!  The Mudbugs won!  Several of our students bought some Vuvuzuela-esque horns and thoroughly annoyed everybody around us.  I feel sorry for this poor lady who is on the receiving end of a Reese horn blow.  There were many fights and high scoring.  It went into overtime.  Right as overtime was approaching, Colin decided to get sick all over everything.  He caught a 24 hour stomach virus.  I was up until 4:30 AM trying to attend to him.  Sarah made me go to bed because I needed rest for Serve! the next day.

Serve! was an interesting affair.  We thought we'd do a 'random projects' day.  Basically, we would let the students decide what we were going to do.  We tried to go to some nursing homes and sing.  Our plan was to go from room to room singing.  Upon practicing, we realized that nobody REALLY knew the words to the songs we selected, so we had to try for plan B.  Plan B was to go to a few of the local schools and REALLY pick up some trash.  We had 19 people in all participate.  We were able to clean up the campuses of Sam Houston Middle School and Davey Crockett Elementary School.  They did so great and I was so proud.  We finished our day with a trip to McDonalds for lunch and some basketball at the park.

Our Students outside of Davy Crockett Elementary School

That night, Tim caught the stomach bug, and was out of commission.  This meant that him and Jenni would need to go home, also meaning that we were 2 Sunday School helpers down and one band leader down.  We also had another teacher out.  We improvised Sunday School, watching a Tim Hawkins DVD.  Going into the morning worship service, my stomach started to be in pain!  I rushed home quickly and soon realized that I, too, had the stomach bug.  It put me out of commission for many hours, and I did something I've never done as a staff member...miss because of sickness.

Sarah tried to run the youth band as well as she could.  Discipleship was cancelled, and our mentor meeting is pushed back to next week.

What did I learn from this?

• Church Staff need to be gone from church sometimes...probably more than they are
• The world won't end if I'm not at church
• People are understanding
• I need to be more prepared and need to equip my volunteers more to handle these crisis times