we finished working with our site church today. all of us have loved working with them. the program at night has still continued to stink (mainly because it has been a program).
a little good a little bad
every now and then i have wi fi access at the mission trip i am presently on and so i now have the chance and ability to post. the trip has been positive and negative at the same time.
first the positive.
- the church we are working with in doing a neighborhood vacation bible school has been amazing. all of the teens and adults have loved the church and the kids. this church is incredibly interested in being involved with their community. it’s great.
- the church has also made us feel very welcome there. they have been very enjoyable to hang out with. we already feel like we belong with them.
- the kids we are working with have been amazing. they are starved for attention, and love being with our teens. therefore, our teens have loved being with them. our teens have befriended the kids of the neighborhood we are in with an intense and great love that i am sure GOD is honored by.
- my teens – enough said. i have the greatest youth and youth workers in the world. i love them. they take any situation and work with it.
now for the negative
- the whole program has been very poorly organized. every leader’s meeting i go to has a volunteer in it rather than staff and the meeting ends up with the volunteer having to say over and over, “i’m sorry i don’t know i’ll have to ask part of the leadership team.” why have a meeting and waste my time if it’s not going to answer questions. the most telling statement of the disorganization is that all of the schedules given to the teens have been wrong. so from the first day all 500 teens that are here have been dependent upon their leaders for knowing what was supposed to happen.
- whoever planned the schedule has no understanding of the developmental needs of teens. consider trying to control middle schoolers as you take their whole saturday and push them through 4 one and a half hour long “training” sessions with only lunch for a break. the sermons weren’t even active in their nature. it was 6 hours of lecture and singing. or consider being forced to keep 500 teens quiet for an hour right outside of the church’s first worship service waiting for the moment that the pastor calls for them to dramatically march into the service and be “commissioned” for all the church to see.
- on the schedule we have free time but in truth it is merely travel time. this translates to everyone feeling tired and worn out.
so the good side of all this is that all the stuff that we have planned and done at our work church has been very positive and our kids have loved it. this means that my teens will leave with a good experience that has brought them closer to GOD and our work church will have been able to use us as tools to extend their ministry. the bad side is that i have basically paid someone else lots of money for me to do my own mission trip, because what they have done has added very little good.
if you can’t tell i’m a little bitter.
a new mission trip
i love trying new things – when i’m in a place that i am familiar. the problem is this week i am doing a “new to me” mission experience with some of my youth. it’s called global encounter. thus far there have been somethings that i liked about it and somethings that i haven’t liked about it. the biggest thing i have realized is that i am very comfortable with change when i am in control of it. i do not like having to “float along” in someone else’s sea and be captive to their winds and currents.
of course, this whole thought then turns in on me and i have to start considering if i am forcing teens to “float in my sea” or if i am inviting them to float with me. floating with me is cool but just being in my world that i control is awful frightening. i might have to reconsider some of my creative projects when i get back home.
global domination
we’ve made it to global encounter in houston texas and spent our first night sleeping on the floor. not a bad experience on awhole. there is something about sleeping on an air mattress on the floor with a bunch of other people in the same room that is quite fun. you learn new things about people. you learn who talks in their sleep, who snores (that would be me), who can’t last the whole night without having to go to the restroom, and who uses too much cologne or axe body spray. it’s a fun and interesting experience.
it’s a great big stupid world
people around the london bombing (or 7/7 as some as calling it) are placing their pictures on the london bombing photo pool. most of them are captured stills from television news programs but there are some from people who were in the subways during and after the explosions.
other countries stood with, mourned with, and prayed for us when we were attacked. now we need to do the same thing for our friends across the pond.
the state of the blogsphere
yesterday i posted about the great and instant increase in the number of visitors to this blog and the confusion that it was causing me. thankfully, adam from ys forum blogring told me that the ys update listed my blog as their blog of the week. while i appreciate the “nod of the head” i do feel i have to ask “why would they list my blog?”
so here are my thoughts:
- ys has made a huge mistake meaning to actually type the url of http://disciplenow.blogspot.com/ instead of http://disciple-now.blogspot.com/ and accidentally sent innocent people to my blog.
- whoever picks the “blog of the week” for the ys update was smoking something strange last week when they were putting together the update.
- they have recommended so many blogs that they have reached the end of the blogsphere and are stuck recommending mine.
all i know for sure is that as someone who respects ys greatly i’m a little disappointed that you’ve dropped to such a low level. common ys i know you can do better.
don’t touch that it’s …
oh my word it was hot tonight at the view. what a perfect night for the air conditioning to break – a night when we were cooking out, it was 95 degrees, and the humidity was in the mid-80s. the good side is that i sweat out all the impurities that had formerly been in my body – it was like going to a sauna.
some like it hot
tropical storm cindy went by us today without a drop of rain falling. instead of getting any percipitation like our neighbors to the east we had an absolutely gorgeous day that grew quite hot, around 95 degrees fahrenheit / 35 degrees celsius with humidity around 85 percent. which made it the perfect day for our air conditioner to break down. so for our weekly wednesday night worship service we had about 80 people packed into a room watching (and feeling) the heat slowly rise. it was quite miserable except for the worship which was wonderful in spite of the heat. still some rain would have been very nice.
what’s happening here?
if you read this thing regularly you know that this is a small blog. using sitemeter and feedburner i know that i average around 50 friends a day that visit and read this stuff. that’s why why today is so strange. today my sitemeter account is telling me that 139 people have visited the blog thus far today. that’s strange enough because it is significantly larger than a normal day for this blog. the stranger thing to me is that allot of these visits apparently came from email accounts (sitemeter tells me where people are referred from but it doesn’t tell me what entry people are being referred to).
what’s up with that?
if anyone has any idea i sure would appreciate hearing it because i’m at a loss.
alls quite on the baton rouge front
everyone had thought that it would be raining around here by now. in fact, i canceled the soil that was going to be brought to my house because both i and the guy at the garden store thought it would be raining and i would be stuck with a huge mud pile in my front yard. of course, it’s still dry outside right now. who knows when it will finally start raining.