April 2010

April 3rd - Paintball

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Yes! We love paintball. We played most of the day using up all our cash on paint then took full advantage of CiCi's all you can eat buffet. Yum.

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April 9th - Red Durango Worship

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I want to take advantage of this blog to brag on a few of our youth. Fired up, wanting to serve Christ and make an impact at school, Rachel, Justin, and CJ began meeting every Friday during their lunch break to have a worship session in the parking lot of their High School. They brainstormed and soon making it quite an ordeal. They handed out fliers, set up a tent, brought chairs and drinks, and played a guitar and bongos. They did this every Friday almost up to graduation. I'm very proud of them.

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April 11th - The A-Team kickoff

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Something huge that AHYEAH kicked off this month is the A-Team. This is a team of youth within AHYEAH who have committed themselves to taking action throughout the week outside of AHYEAH events (in schools, clubs, social hangouts, etc.). Every other week we have a meething where we give them a challenge for the following two weeks to be evangelistic, promote AHYEAH, or edify our spiritual lives. Should a youth miss two challenges they are off the team for two weeks and then can jump back in again. It's meant to be a challenging thing to be apart of it. Our heart is not for our youth group to become a social club, we as Christians are creating a movement!

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Challenge - Bring a friend to church.

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April 23rd - Brittany's Night

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Brittany Kunick, one of our seniors, is one of the most competitave young ladies I've ever met and this trait makes her very successful at every sport she goes out for. Anyway, on this Friday her team had a tournament and although they started kinda rough, they finished like champions!

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April 24th - Outreach Project

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This was an opportunity for us to get our minds off of ourselves and focus on our community and beyond. We met at the church and did some work projects around the church till 2 or 3 o'clock. We dug rubber mulch out of the playground so it could be sprayed with a preservative, vacuumed the children's area and youth room, washed all the windows in the childrens area, cleaned both of the bathrooms and did general cleaning back there. We also rearranged the youth room (better than ever) and disposed of one extremely smelly diaper (please dispose of the trash when your done using the nursery!!!. Then we followed up all of this the next day (Sunday) with bringing any extra lightly worn shoes that we had and donating them to Soles for Souls who would in turn ship them to Haiti. Also, on top of that we went shoeless all day that Sunday to empathize with and remember those in Haiti who we were praying for.

It went really well. Of everyone, I was one of the people who forgot and wore shoes to service. Then, right in the middle of the "9", someone said, "Hey, aren't we suppose to be shoeless?" It was hilarious, suddenly everyone was pulling and kicking their shoes off and the smell was . . .

We truly have a youth group that cares for people.

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By the way, we raised 109lbs of shoes to send to Haiti!!!

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April 25th - A-Team

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Wow, from that last challenge of bringing a friend to AHYEAH, we had 15 visitors in only two weeks!!! That is a huge testamony to our youth.

It was alot of fun debriefing about what it was like to invite people. Some found it very challening and awkward, but said that it got easier the more they did it. Others really had no problem. The other half of the challenge was as a youth group to make the visitors feel welcome, and boy did they. Every new youth was welcomed and instantly excepted. We have awesome youth!

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New Challenge - Start a spiritual conversation. (ex. What do you think about atheism? Why do bad things happen to good people? Do you believe in evolution? Do you think there is a higher power?)

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April 28th - Laser Tag

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This was truly an experience. So, laser tag was a huge hit. On Wednesday nights we ususally have 20-25 youth attend, but tonight we had 41! Everyone brought friends and we packed out the bus and every vehicle we access to. We arrived at Lazer Quest 10 minutes late and they dropped our reservation. So, we had to play our game 45 minutes later than expected, cutting our time from 2 games to 1 game. Then, they informed us that they can only serve 38 kids at a time. Awesome (sarcasm). So, all the leaders and the older youth sat out and let everyone else get signed in. The 38 youth went in and had a blast! They loved it!

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Side story: So, Lazer Quest made me the deal to give each youth two games for $14 dollars, that's an entire dollar off for each kid, wow (more sarcasm). So, youth showed up with 10's, 5's, and 20's to pay me. Luckly, enough youth paid me with 1's that I only owed a couple that I needed to make change for. SO NOW, because we were 10 minutes late we lost the opportunity to play one of the games . . . now I owe everyone $7 (that's a 5 and two 1's, and all I have in my pocket are 20's, 10's, and no 1's, and I've never even met 8 of these youth before). So, problem solver that I am, I set out on a mission to make change before the kids are done with their game. Jacqui points and says, "Hey, there's a bill changer that accepts 20's!" It wasn't till after my 20 was slipping from my fingers that I realized . . . YES! I now have 20 dollars worth of quarters! So, now on to plan B, I am running, on foot, across the strip mall from store to store to gas station asking clerks to break 20's and 10's into 5's and 1's, meanwhile I am jingling with 5lbs of quarters weighing down my pants and causing attention. Well, this story concludes with a happy ending. I didn't get jumped, or accused of robbing a convenient store and by the time I made it back to the bus they were coming out of the building. I payed everyone back (though some left with 7 dollars of quarters, sorry), and all ended smoothly. :)