Wow!

Wow! That's the only word I can use to describe our kickoff night last night. Let me just give you some facts:
*We had to scramble to fit everyone into the meal AND then use the Crusader room as overflow
*With all the students, classes, and meal attendees we are OUT of tables in the church
*Even Though we ordered at least two extra copies of material per Bible class we still are ordering more materials because of the number of new students who came
*Even though we put stadium seating in the youth room to buy us space we were still standing room only.
*We ran out of our gift bags for new youth group students (and we thought we made enough for the first few months!), and all the new students said they can't wait to come back next week!

How awesome is God! I don't even have words anymore to describe God's awesomeness.

We had a great opening night of Middle School youth group. We started with the opportunity to win some candy bars, then got to BLAST thousands of cheese puffs at each other in a game called Cheese Puff BLAST (for those concerned we did have tarps down). We then got to welcome our new BLAST intern Ryan by blasting dozens of candy bars at him (I had a nice bag for them, but the students preferred this method). For the first part of this year Ryan and I are doing a series of messages of the five parts of BLAST. I kicked us off this week by talking about helping others to Believe. Did you know that the very last thing Jesus said before ascending to heaven was that we need to be his witnesses? You can check it out in Acts 1:8. God wants to use us to tell others about the eternal life Christ gives us. We were able to watch a great clip from End of the Spear that encourages us to worry more about helping others live eternally in heaven then what may happen to us if we tell us (ex. being made fun of). Our students then had some great discussion as they got into their small groups for the first time. It was a great night and I just can't wait for week #2!

Now only 10 hours before I get to eat my weight in ribs! I'm drooling just thinking about it.