Love Actually

Melissa, Angela, Me, Izzy

Playing "Shuffle Your Buns" Aries (in the white hat) is sitting on David

Izzy loves her dad!

Dumb Idea Boys! (They are holding 4 chairs off the ground w/ a boy on top)

Our Breakfasts...quite different from Western Camp food

Love Actually Conference was the last weekend in October (I told you I was really behind)!! It was quite an experience, let me tell you. First, it was the first conference that I had seen all the behind the scenes planning of. I will never be able to go to a conference and not be able to think about all the work that went into it. Wow. The first evening we went out to Breakthrough camp in Shatin. This isn't too far from the office, but it is up in the mountains. They had beautiful facilities, and it worked great for what we had in mind. We got everything set up and I was put in charge of rooming assignments and registration and such. I never knew rooming assignments could be so complicated. And then the kids wanted to switch when they got there....yikes. But it went good. We had a main session the first night and one breakout session. The Breakout sessions were divided into boys and girls. An adult leader from each gender would be in charge of a session. I even got to teach last minute because one of the leaders' baby got sick and so his wife wasn't able to teach. So Saturday was filled with a few main sessions and several breakout sessions. And Sunday was the same. The most memorable session was the GENDER SWAP, when Tim and Mike came up to the girls' classroom and had to answer about 150 questions shot at them from a white board filled with questions, post it notes with questions, and teenage girls eager to ask the questions they've always wanted to know about guys! Those girls were super direct, as were the answers that Mike and Tim gave (some of them, I'm sure the girls didn't like hearing). It was a good time. I am drawing a blank on all of the events of that conference due to the amount of time that has lapsed.
Saturday was kind of a crazy day for me. A girl threw up in the bathroom after a game we played as a group. She forgot to mention it to anyone, so I walked into the bathroom to find sprite, banana, and bok choy in a gooey mess. I was not very happy. And then a girl in one of the cabins was having issues with her eyes and I was worried it was an allergic reaction. At the same time, another girl was having emotional issues, and I ended up yelling at her to get to the session when she didn't the first time I told her. It turned out to be a bit of miscommunication on my part, and then I found out later that that was the first youth event she had been to in like 2 years. MAN! So I felt horrible and had to find her later to apologize. I also taught a session on Saturday. My session was on Finding Your Significance in Christ. This was supposedly supposed to go very well, because I have been dealing with that very issue of Christ being sufficient for me, while I'm over here alone, and in life in general. So I ended up talking a lot of the time, which I didn't really want to do, but it kind of happened. It was really good to have the other female leaders there because when they saw that the conversation was lacking, that they could put in a thought or two. So that saved me a few times. At the end I felt it went OK, but not that great. But amazingly, God still used it: At the end two girls came up to me and said it was exactly what they needed to hear. I love when that happens and I know it's totally apart from anything I did.
I learned a lot that weekend. It was a new experience to be a leader in a few things. In the past I have been a student leader, and this transition into a leader, period, has been a hard, interesting, but good, process. I think the main thing I learned as a leader was something that Mike mentioned a few days prior, "Being a leader means thinking, If I don't do this or take care of that, who will? Before there was always some one else, but now, I have become that some one else.
I think the kids learned a lot and had fun too. There were a lot of good questions asked and a lot of good discussion. Hopefully they all learned a little bit more of what it means to be pure and live pure in a world that doesn't exactly cultivate that mindset.