Carroty Wood

Phew! I am spending the day recovering from the youth group's yearly trip to Carroty Wood. We had a great time with fantastic weather, although thankfully there wasn't too much sun burn! It is interesting to see the different dynamics when you take away different groups of young people. This year, there was a fairly mixed age range, running from year 6s to Year 12s and everyone got on really well and mucked in together. There was a great team of leaders sorting everything out and - perhaps even more surprising - we had really friendly and helpful coach drivers on both journies!

One of my favourite moments was the night walk on the first night, which had an extra twist as a number of the leaders had been kidnapped and needed to be found by the young people. It became even more interesting as the leaders accompanying the young people also had no idea where they were... twas great fun!

Another 'hilight' was the water slide that I bought recently... A hose attaches to a large piece of plastic and it squirts water out creating an amazing water slide that runs along the grass for 6.5 metres! At least that was the idea - the reality was a little more pathetic and, in truth didn't really work! I had been hyping this up to the other leaders for weeks and was v excited about it. Never mind...

The whole thing was great fun and wonderful for building relationships and creating brilliant memories - I now need to decide what we are doing next year!

Poetry

We had a great session with Disciple the other week, which is the Bible Study group for Years 7-9. The previous week had involved looking at the subject of worship, so we then had a worship practical. The practical explored ways that young people can worship God in their own personal spaces, and took the emphasis away from singing as the main way to worship. One of the things that people did was to write acrostic poems and I thought they were superb. Here's a couple:

Forgiving all sins
All you have to do
Is pray
Then god will forgive you and the
Holy spirit will reign again....
.....all it takes is a little faith

Father of all and father of me
Awesome and mighty yet you let me just be
True to your word even when I can't see it
How gracious you are even when I can't feel it
Echoed through creation is your power and might, yet you're
Right there beside me in the darkest of nights.

Father God I love you
Amen

Amazing grace
Beautiful face
Caring majesty
Dad of me
Everlasting king, what a
Fantastic thing
Gracious messiah, you are
Higher
Incredible teacher
Joyful preacher
Kind
Life dealer
Mind healer
Never ending son, the
Only one, you're
Powerful now
Queens and kings will bow
Righteous, victorious
Simply glorious, who's
Terrific and true
Unbelievably it's you!
Vile things will crumble
Wicked towers will crumble
Xenophilic and calm
Yahweh, you are! You are a
Zealous God!!!

The Blasts

Thursday was such a strange day. I was in a meeting when I first heard about the bombings in London and to be honest, I didn't grasp the magnitude of what had happened until a couple of hours later. It was so weird to be living on the edge of London and in one respect to feel so close to such tragedies but also to feel very far away from all that was happening.

I also wanted to do something helpful and productive but realised that there was very little I could do - I vaguely thought about trying to see if we could open up the church so people could sleep there for the night but I knew that if people could get to Enfield, they could probably get all the way home. I then figured that the only thing that I could do - and ironically the best thing for me to do - was to pray, which I did! Wish I didn't have this need to be helpful all the time...

It was a privilege and a responsibility to run a youth group meeting Thursday night as some of the young people I know met together to think and pray about what had happened. I was struck again by the intense feelings and thoughts that many young people have. It was a real honour to be able to chat through some of the things that were going through their heads, including thinking about the number of people killed by war and poverty every day that don't seem so real to us as they are much further away.

I don't know anyone who was hurt in the bombings, although a lot of near miss stories are surfacing. I will continue to pray for the people involved, although sometimes words are hard to come by.