Romania

Just a quick note.  We are headed out soon for Romania. Please keep us in your prayers, that we have a safe trip, that we get a lot accomplished in the projects we are doing, that we have good interactions with the Romanians, and that the students learn more about God and having faith in Him through this project.  I will update you on when we get back, but please keep us in your prayers until then. This is the type of trip that can change lives, and therefore is one I fully expect spritual warfare to be raging during.  Help us fight the good fight with your prayers. Thanks.

First School Year = Over

So I have now completed my first school year w/ Club beyond.  HS graduation is tonight, last night was MS graduation, the night before was HS Baccalaureate, so fairly busy week with stuff to go to.  Last week we had our end of the semester clubs for both HS and MS. We had mid 60 hs students show up and a number of family members, so it was a good way to end the year.  We grilled, played some games, and spent some time saying good bye to those who will PCS this summer and to our graduates.  We did something similar for the MS. 

So now we are on to summer.  The biggest thing immediately is the service project to Romania. We will be gone for about a week and a half early on in the summer (can't get more specific than that in a public forum).  We have been doing a lot of prep work for this project, collecting supplies and taking donations and doing training with the students we are taking. We did an overnighter last weekend where we did team building exercises, did a Bible study on being a servant, spent time in prayer, and talked about expectations and what we all felt we needed to be successful. This will not be an easy trip. It is going to be long days and hours of tough work in extremely poor areas. This trip  has the potential to push some of the participants to the end of their rope.  But as I like to say being at the end of your rope is a bad place to be but a good place to have been. It is not fun in the moment, and very tough, but those are the times we see the most growth and development.  Those are the moments when God does amazing things and changes lives.  So please pray that we are challenged and pushed in such a way that it is only through God that we accomplish anything. 

Back to the end of the year thing. This is something I am slightly torn about. I am really looking forward to summer and a change in routine.  But I am torn about PCS season.  We have a lot of students who are moving, and it will be really sad to see some of them go.  It has already been sad saying good bye to some who have left already.  But at the same time it is exciting to think about the new students who will be here.  Part of this is out of selfish thought.  With this last years group of students, I have felt more like "the NEW club guy", which is true and what I have been.  Now, I will just be "the club guy." I am not new, and will have been here longer than a third of our kids.  It will just be a different dynamic that I am looking forward to.        

Pep assembly

For blog post 2 this week I want to tell you about last friday.  As I had mentioned before I was asked to lead the Pep assembly at the middle school.  Now, I have led a lot of games, activities, events, etc. in my not very long life, but I have never led something for over 500 middle schoolers.  This was a bit of a challenge and I was fairly nervous about it.  I got things all prepared and had activities planned out, but the morning of, I get there and realize, this is not going to work as planned.  One activity in particular was not going to work.  I had a quiz show type thing set up where incorrect answers resulted in getting a pie to the face, and correct answers allowing you to pie a fellow contestant.  The problem was we were outside (which I knew in advance) and had no microphone. I had been told i would have a wireless mic, but when it was set up, there was no mic to be found. So the whole assembly I had to yell loud enough that 500 plus energetic middle schoolers could hear me.  This meant any type of game that involved talking was out.  So that game was scratched.  On the plus side, it will work great as a club game so it will not have been a waste of time planning the game.  The competitions I ended up running were a walk off contest, where students and teachers from each grade acted as models and had to strike poses, which the other contestants would need to copy and elaborate on, then a relay race where a runner carries someone on their back and sprints, and then a big tug of war contest.  All in all, I think it went pretty well.  I was told by a lot of people how much fun it was, and the school already asked me to come back next year, so it must have been good enough.  After the assembly, I ran dodgeball tournaments for the rest of the day and helped out w/ various other activities they were running. 

As I said, I was not originally thrilled by this idea.  It was a bit overwhelming, and I doubted that I could do it well.  Was it the best assembly ever? Not even close.  Will the students remember it for the rest of their lives? Probably not.  But what it did was help me get more involved at the school and get the Club Beyond name and my face out there. Throughout the day, I interacted with hundreds of middle schoolers. I am guessing I talked to 100 kids who I had not had any contact with all year.  It won me some brownie points with school administrators for spending a whole day there and helping out.  I didn't mention God or Jesus once during the day (big no-no at school), but things like this help me get my foot in the door w/ students. It opens up communication, where I can say hi to more kids now and interact w/ them, and then down the road I am inviting them to Club and talking about what we do, and from those conversations I get to share the love of God with them. It is a process, and this is a really good first step to be able to take w/ some of the students.  Sometimes, I just need to get out of my own way and let God work through me in ways that I might be too scared to try, but through him all things are possible.          

     

Auschwitz

So I have fallen a bit behind on the blogs, and there is a lot to fill you in on.  So instead of writing one really long blog that no one reads all the way through I am going to post multiple updates this week.
So update #1: Auschwitz.

Over Memorial day weekend we went on a trip to Poland to see the concentration camp Auschwitz. It was a gerat weekend.  There were times it was a lot of fun, there were other times it was very sobering and educational.  The fun times were hanging out w/ the stuednts and families who came along.  It was a lot of quality time w/ some great people.  Each night we would do discussion time and debriefing from the day. After that we would hang out and play games.

Auschwitz is an enormous camp, w/ two main sections. There are a lot of parts to it, but the best known are Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau.  We went to Auschwitz 1 one day and had a guided tour, and then to Birkenau the next day and went on our own.  A lot of people will do both in the same day and do a three hour tour total. I would not recommend that. It took us three hours to see Auschwitz 1. It is also a lot to digest and is very overwhelming, so splitting it up worked really well.  At Auschwitz 1 we talked a lot about Father Maximilian Kolbe, who is known as the saint of Auschwitz.  He was a priest put into the camp for speaking out against the Nazis. One day a prisoner was to be executed and he stepped forward to ask if he could take the mans place.  The SS agreed and put him in a room to starve him to death w/ other prisoners. Throughout the next two weeks Father Kolbe led prayer and singing while slowly starving to death. After two weeks he was still alive, and needing the room to punish other prisoners, they gave him a lethal injection. To be at a place, see where he stood, where he was punished and died for such a selfless act, to learn about something so amazing in such a horrendous place was awe inspiring.  In the midst of one of the most evil events in the history of the world God used someone to inspire and give hope.  

It was an experience I will not ever forget. It was also great to be able to share it with students, to be able to discuss it with them and see how they reacted to things we were learning. 

Ok, enough for now. In the next few days I will post about end of the school year, leading a pep assembly at the middle school, and what is coming up in the near future.