Bill & Sue's Journal
Journal
Entry: Tuesday afternoon, April 15,
2008
When
you come to a fork in the road, take it! With our youth group we’ve
been studying decision making and how our emotions are effected by
decisions we make. I thought when preparing the lessons, there would be
little interest, but boy was I wrong. And
since the series was started, we have run a gambit of emotions.
The
past couple weeks have covered the extremes. With a Sunday night youth
service at church that everyone participated in; a Friday evening
prayer vigil that was planned to go from eight in the evening until
midnight but continued way beyond; and a
combined Saturday night youth meeting. One week we were out every night
with small group meetings, rehearsals and activities, and then, all of
a sudden, to the other extreme, I was laid up for a week in a dark room
after a surgery on my eyes.
Each
time the teens have charge of a Sunday night service the whole
congregation loves it. The kids enjoy using their talents, the music is
more upbeat than usual, and the message is directed more toward the
youth, all of which makes everyone feel younger. During the month of
April there is a competition between the young people and adults in who
can memorize more verses. The losers have to prepare and serve dinner
to the winners, but then again everyone who memorizes scripture will be
a winner in the long run! Right now the younger ones are in the lead.
The
night of prayer was planned, and shame on me, I thought very few would
come out to pray, but in the end there were almost forty that showed
up. We divided the evening up with brief studies of types of prayer
(worship, confession, thanksgiving, intercession, consecration). Then,
after each meditation, people went with different groups to pray
according to what they had just learned and pray for specific subjects.
The evening ended around one in the morning, and folks left saying that
we should do this more often.
With
teens, you have to have new ideas. As part of the Bible study time,
volunteers had to try the ingredients that go into making chocolate
chip cookies before mixing them in. Of course everyone got some of
Sue’s cookies when we made the application to the lesson. And what do
you do when there’s no snow for a good snowball fight? Make snowballs
out of newspaper held together by masking tape. For kids that have
never seen snow before, they picked up on the idea quickly! Check out
pictures on our blog at http://spoelhof-brazilnuts.blogspot.com
My
mom and dad moved into a retirement home (Beacon Hill in Grand Rapids)
the first weekend of April. To us, it is a relief that they are not on
their own (they’re going to be ninety-five this year). But for them,
after sixty years in the same house, it has to be an extremely
emotional time.
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