Christmas Blessing to All!!!

We want to wish everyone a very blessed and happy Christmas celebration. Our family is glad to be spending time in Minnesota and Iowa over the next week, reconnecting with our families, relaxing, and celebrating God's gift. I wish everyone a great time of relaxing, avoiding anything dealing with school, snowmobiling, presents, getting fat like me, and finding time to really think about what this holiday is all about. I'm excited for our upcoming Silver Birch Retreat, and if you or a friend is not already signed up please do so by Sunday. There are registration cards in the youth room, as well as a box to placed your filled out stuff.

This past week both of our ministries spent sometime talking about the gift of Jesus. I think sometimes we focus so much on the cute factor of the Christmas story that we miss out on what its all really about. On Christmas God CHOOSES to leave the perfect bliss of heaven, taking on this lovely thing we call humanity. You know humanity, its the thing you always complain about. Pain, work, criticism, death, losing loved ones, illness, feeling tired, etc. Yet, God CHOOSES to take that all on, to experience what our life is like. But, even more, God CHOOSES to suffer and die. Not just to experience those things, but to conquer death FOR YOU AND ME. We are given the gift of eternal life because God chose to come to earth as a human, to take the punishment once and for all for all the bad things you and I do. My challenge to everyone this Christmas is: what do you do with that gift? Is it like that favorite present that you use again and again, telling everyone you see about? Or is it like that bread pan from my wedding, which sits in a closet for six years collecting dust? Do you put your faith on the shelf, or are you really living it? It's great to see the wall outside the youth room full of ways people are going to respond to Jesus' gift. My prayer is that you follow through and live every day with Christ as we head into 2010.

Have a great Christmas everyone, and see you all in January!

Silver Birch and marshmallow mayhem

I now know how Cinderella must have felt: half the day on my hands and knees cleaning up marshmallow particles from last night (had tarps, they failed). Oh, the things that youth ministry entails. We're getting REALLY excited about our Silver Birch Retreat, January 8-10th, for both Middle School and High School students. If you have not signed up yet please do so, as it's going to be an exciting weekend of games, activities, and worship on our theme: How NOT to Get Caught.

Last night we did have a lot of fun throwing marshmallows and cheese puffs all over the youth room in a variety of different games. We then turned to part three of our Big Time Basics series, this week talking about Jesus. We opened with a clip from the DaVinci code in which the Prof. Lee character claims the idea that Jesus was God was invented 300 years after his death. The Bible, however, tells us that Jesus was 100% human (John 1:14: So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us) AND 100% God (John 1:1-3: In the beginning, the Word already existed. He was with God, and he was God. He was in the beginning with God. He created everything there is. Nothing exists that He didn't make). That seems rather strange to us, but it's how it had to be for God to fulfill his mission. He had to take on human/fleshly elements to teach us directly, experience the difficulties of human life (pain, illness, sadness, suffering, rejection, etc., and to pay the price for our sins. Yet, he remained God through it all, so that it is GOD, and not some mere messenger, that does all those things FOR US. When we get that it becomes so obvious how great God's love is for us.




AND 100% God

Cancelation for tonight

Because of the storm and because Oostburg schools canceled we will not be having Youth Group or any of our other programs tonight. Hope everyone enjoys their day off of school and PLEASE stay warm and safe today. We'll see you next week.

Breakfast Buffet

Saturday is our annual Breakfast Buffet Fundraiser. This has proven to be one of the best fundraisers for our ministry year end and year out, so we're excited for Saturday. The breakfast runs from 7-11am in the HRC fellowship hall. Cost is a free will donation. We'll have all the typical breakfast foods, plus THREE made to order omelet stations. We'd love to have a packed house to support our two major trips this year, our Winter Silver Birch Retreat and our summer mission trip to Annville, KY. Students, just a reminder that the 2 shifts are 6am-9am and 9am-noon. Middle schoolers help set-up Friday, from 5pm-6:15pm. Anyone bringing utensils needs to have them to church by 5pm Friday.

Follow us on Facebook! After years of resistance I have finally gotten into the world of Facebook over the past few months. If you want to further keep up with the world of BLAST Youth Ministry become my friend on there and join our BLAST ministry group.