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.