Youth Quake

We are smack dab in the middle of Youth Quake. It's our middle school service project camp that we run for our district. We have around 15 churches or so represented here with almost 200 students and leaders.

The whole concept of this camp is to help middle school students learn how to serve God by serving others. The basis of this comes straight out of the Bible. Check out this passage from Matthew 25 in the New Testament. It is a record of Jesus speaking. He basically says that whenever we care for someone else, it is like we are caring for Him. Amazing! When we give a hungry person some food, it is like we are giving food to Jesus. I love that!

These middle school students are tearing it apart. They are serving like crazy and I am just amazed. Our service projects include the following: working with the elderly at care centers; doing absolutely free car washes; working in community gardens with the area food shelters; making, serving and eating lunch with the homeless. There are a bunch more things and they are so cool.

Tomorrow we will be putting on a carnival at Grant Community School for kids of all ages. Every church will be running several different booths. There will be face painting, balloon popping, bean bag tosses and a bunch more. Of course there will be free cotton candy and sno-cones. yummm.

The evenings are filled with fun and serious times. We did the amazing race yesterday and it was so much fun. There was a dunk tank and there was getting into frozen clothes and slip and slides and launching of those marshmallow snoballs, just to name a few things. We went to a park with water fountains to play in and had a huge soccer game and enjoyed some amazing BBQ chicken.

The serious stuff is our evening sessions. We have 5 sessions and 4 speakers. I get to speak twice and then Kyle, Jessica and Michelle each get to speak. We also had some special guests from China share with us tonight too. I also have the great privilege of leading worship. There truly is nothing like leading 200 middle schoolers in song about God and to God when they have spent the day serving others. I can't believe I get to do what I do. What a true privilege.

I will toss some pics up soon.