Youth Conference Day 1

It’s been just over a year since I’ve done an overnight youth event and I honestly forgot how awesome they are. We took 33 kids about 3 hours away to Entebbe for three day youth conference and it was just way too cool! You know those times when you’re preparing for something and you’re praying that God would be in all the details, but then when it comes to the actual event and things don’t go your way and you freak out, well, that was me for some of our trip.
It started out waking up in the wee hours of the morning and it pouring outside. Little by little the kids started to trickle in and by seven everyone was there…except for the bus. Around 8 the bus came and instead of seating 36 it sat 24, I have to admit I was not amused and I got in touch with my inner business tycoon and pretty much didn’t hold back when the guy was trying to charge us more for a bigger bus. In the end, we took one of our vans and the smaller bus, and I finally left at 8:40, over an hour and a half late. It was cool though, because I was in our van with Ryan and a bunch of the boys and so it was cool getting to be around them when they weren’t trying to be cool. We finally got to Entebbe at around noon and from there went to the church and hand lunch. Ok, now I know this sounds crazy, but I hate beans and that was a part of lunch but to humor everyone I ate my whole plate of food, including the beans, I have to admit I was pretty proud of myself.
We got ready to start the first session and the speaker looked at the schedule that had been sent to me and saw I was scheduled to talk about David and Jonathan (which I had been super excited about) and he told me he hadn’t heard about that and so his whole teaching was on their friendship. I have to admit I was pretty bummed as I love that whole story and all that lies in there. That also meant that I had an hour to write a teaching for the biggest group of students I’ve ever taught before. God is good though, and He just kind of kicked my butt about where my heart was in the whole thing and how I was lacking faith like none other. I ended up teaching on what it means to be a friend of God above all else, and honestly I really feel that was the teaching God wanted me to do, so it was cool.
After my teaching, they were trying to involve the audience and they asked people who their best friends were and at that time I had come in and Richard gave me a high five and so they asked him if I was his best friend and then they had us come up to the stage and talk about why the other person was our “best” friend. Richard pulled a fast one on me and totally played it up like we were more than friends and told everyone (all 100+ people) about how when he’s sad I say, “sweetheart, what’s wrong?” I seriously turned about 600billion shades of red, it was fun though because all the kids were dying laughing. After he went up, it was my turn, and so I just said that he’s like a big brother to me and I love how we’re just able to talk. Needless to say, we now have a super fun inside joke and call each other “sweetheart”. After that there was some time for presentations and then we went down to the lake and hung out, it was cool getting to laugh with everyone, and at least so far, it seems like this is really good to help grow my relationship with the girls. After dinner and sharing with Brenda because I was still full from lunch, we watched a movie, of course I was dying the whole time because I was tired, but it was still really awesome.