Oh yes, and....

Sanctuary was the weekend after Love Actually. Sanctuary is a one day conference aimed to get kids from a lot of different schools in HK together. This was the back breaker for me. I had volunteered to teach a session like a month before, and was going crazy. Besides that, Mike had just left for his youth conference in the states, and the idea of a week of being "in charge" was weighing on me. My session was on world religions, and was so cleverly named, "Around the World in 80 Faiths". Thankfully, I did not talk about anywhere near 80 religions. I only talked about 5. But let me back up a bit.
We were supposed to meet a bus in TST that would take us to HKIS, one of the most expensive schools in Hong Kong that is on the backside of the Island. It is extremely gorgeous there, and the outside lunchroom looks over a steep hill at a harbour and sandy beach below. I only had a few kids going that were actually my own, but I had several that had registered with us and kind of attached themselves to our group. Me and Aries raced through TST to get to the bus on time, got there, and there were only like 5 other kids besides ours on the bus. So we got to know them a bit. There were two brothers from Macau and a friend of theirs from Kowloon. Then there were two girls who were probably like 12 or 13. So they all attached themselves to our group, as they were without one. So that was fun. So we got to HKIS pretty early. So I went to "set up my room" and lo and behold, my powerpoint doesn't work. At this point, I almost had a heart attack. It was not good. But one of the boys from Macau was able to help me and we got it so that we could see all of the text, but my cool background that I had worked so hard at, didn't show up. But that was OK. I didn't save that presentation, because I figured if I left it on the computer, it would be OK for an hour or so. Big mistake. I came back with a bunch of kids ready to hear about sharing their faith and the computer was frozen. So after a bit more spazzing, we figured out that we could use the powerpoint, with the cool background, but it just wouldn't project as a slide show, it just looked like the computer screen. So that was that. My first session I had about 12 kids. Which was pretty good. I felt very dumb trying to tell them about Hinduism and Buddhism, when half of Hong Kong practices Buddhism. Actually, more than half probably. There were a few kids that were looking at me like, She doesn't know what she's talking about... but the rest were OK. In the end it turned out I had way too much information than I could cover in 45 minutes. So I didn't get to it all. So for the second session, I had most of my kids that came with me, and a good amount of kids that I had met at Love Actually the previous weekend. It was very encouraging. I think I had 20-25 ish kids there, which was really good for that conference. So I started out by asking what religions out of the five they wanted to hear about (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Mormonism, and Scientology). We ended up talking about Mormonism for most of the time (which was good because I had read a ton on that because I was curious myself, and was able to talk a lot about it and answer some questions), and then we briefly covered Scientology. So that one was really good, and I had my friend May (a youth leader from another church) there. I love that woman! She is always so encouraging, and she always has her focus on Christ. I felt so relieved after I was done talking. So I enjoyed the rest of the conference. We weren't really part of the planning, but we did some of the prep work for the conference, so after I was done teaching, I could just relax a bit and hang out with the kids. We were supposed to get a bus back to TST and Hung Hom (where the church is) but there was this huge complication and mix up, which was easily solved in the end, just took a long time. It was so surreal, all these kids were asking me where we were going and what we were going to do and if they should get on this bus or that. It's all part of that line I've crossed....Oh well, no going back now!