Week Six. Christmas strikes back!

Week six, or as I apparently pronounce it “week Sex” due to my accent… they wind me up about my pronunciations a lot, but hey, such is communal living. Yet again I am a week late, so please accept my apologies.

Week Six started with the start Christmas… Yes, here as soon as Halloween is over, Christmas begins. Of course they have thanksgiving here (the last Thursday of November), but seem to overlook it and start playing Christmas tunes everywhere.  So I came into St. Luke’s to have a meeting in Children’s ministries, on what we were doing now the Genesis session was over, and also to start planning our topics come January, because we only had four weeks of programming before we finished for the two weeks off at Christmas, and with one week off at Thanksgiving, we had to start onto the Advent series… Yes I had to start talking about the Christmas story in November. So we agreed on the order of each week, in which I would take the kids who came in for the second half of afternoon programming, and those who remained from the first half (as many go off to the children’s choir), and I would read them a Christmas themed story, along with the corresponding scripture from Matthew and Luke, along with organising a corresponding craft activity, and either preparing games for them, or bringing them to the playground. Although I don’t yet feel in the Christmas spirit, I still love getting to read with the children, and talk to them about what they do at Christmas. Their wee worlds are just brilliant.

I went straight from that meeting to another, this time with global Missions in regards to the phone call script I wrote up in preparation to trying to set up a new missions partner with our Jamaica Health Mission. Apparently the letter was completely perfect, then we went on to change everything except four lines…. It was funny though, to see how some phrases I use are just not used here in the States, there are a number of cultural differences I have started to pick up on recently.

That afternoon I had children’s ministries, and youth ministries between three PM and eight PM.

Thursday started off with a staff meeting for Missions, where we went over the plans between now and Martin Luther King Day in January. Basically a lot going on over Christmas…. And I mean a lot…. More on that as it comes. But afterwards I worked a bit more on a Jamaica partnership and then went and did my first ground work in East Winter Garden.

In EWG Shakeria and I, went around rating houses by appearance, and maintenance needed to the roof, garden, and other structures. We did it by street so we could map out the assets in the community, to set down a general marker, which we can compare the community to in a year to give us an idea on how the transformation is going. It was another good experience to compare and contrast communities from back home with East Winter. After we just sat in the park, which consists of two basketball courts, and a play park, and I just sat and observed the people around. It was not that different to areas of Ballybeen, or Finaghy.

Friday I was off all day and did absolutely nothing… I just sat back and chilled.

Saturday was another Christmas experience, with the United Methodist Women’s Christmas Bazaar (I still stand by that it should be bizarre as it is so early). I was there for just after eight to sell doughnuts and coffee, for the youth fellowship scholarship fund, followed by selling pizza and soda at lunch. To start off, the doughnut guy never showed up, so Pedro had to pick up some from Publix (equivalent to a regular Tesco). Publix only had a dozen. They sold in a flash. Then as it was sports day, and Liverpool FC and Ireland where playing I was checking the score every so often under my small sub sales desk, leading to the Youth Director, Andrew, getting a picture of me looking as if I was asleep… I was not…

To wrap it up, the pizza was late, so instead of getting three deliveries at 10:30, 11:30, and 12:30, we got three around 12:15…. We still sold a lot, and made a good bit of money to the Youth scholarship. Within my time at the Bazaar I saw way too much Christmas, and also a scale replica of the titanic (pictured along with proud new owner), it was just mad!

I went home and watched the last ten minutes of Ireland’s glorious victory over South Africa, which I had sent my family back home to! After that I just did as little as possible.

Sunday started off with Sunday School, where I was with the 7^th and 8^th graders. I cannot stress how hyper they are… and this is at 9:30 in the morning! Still I love working with them!

I then had Sunday contemporary worship, where we looked at the How to Be Rich series on stewardship, particularly fitting, given St. Luke’s current financial status, due to a lack of financial donations through the offering.

Sunday afternoon me Andrew and Pedro sat down and designed a game, which didn’t require us to go by anything else, as to save as much as we can, so this game possibly was one of the more dangerous ones, please do see below for details. So at Youth Fellowship we played this mad game, and then we had a message from Miriam, whom I work with in global missions, on a task the youth were in charge of. The task was, they were to decide where $500, would go, out of a number of cases in Mexico and Malawi, who were applying for a micro loan, to develop their business, and to help local the community economy. It is a great opportunity for youth, to just sit down and talk over these cases, and to think about pros and cons on where this money goes, I love how they are actually given control over the money and where it goes, and not made to just observe what happens.

Monday I came into work, to help Andrew and Pedro, on the new Sunday school curriculum, along with some database entry. We discussed and planned the next four weeks, up to the Christmas, break, and we (as you could guess) are going to focus on advent, mainly joy, peace, and hope, Christmas break starts too early to do love. So we will be scripting, and recording videos for these classes over the next weeks.

Tuesday was another staff meeting where we looked onto the next How to be rich video, which was a very powerful message on how God is not impressed by the amount you give, not by the number of zeros after a number, but by the percentage you give, to paraphrase. Imagine how much the church could do if we all just gave 5% (never mind the tithing 10%). So much more could be done.

Forty-four games that I thought would end with a child in hospital, but somehow didn’t…

#6 The Mummy Obstacle Course

So this came about as we were looking through our youth store room, to see what we had to make a game out of.

Basically you need shaving foam, paper plates, baby diapers, and lots of toilet role, and things to create an obstacle course.  Split the youth into teams of six, five have to complete the obstacle course, to collect supplies, of one plate of shaving foam, one baby diaper, and three toilet roles. They then dress the sixth up as an Egyptian Mummy, by wrapping them in paper and putting shaving foam in the diaper, and putting the diaper on their head. Prizes for, the first group to finish, and for the best looking Mummy.  

In our obstacle course we had a wall of boxes for them to dive over onto gym mats, followed by two crawl tunnels made out of large boxes and hoola-hoops, ending in a wheelchair race, round a cone course.

I want to start something this week that I will try to do each week. I will post a video, or a post I have seen, that has made me go "hmmmm" with a brief thought on it. 

A Thought from the Week

This is a video which I first saw in my second week of my work here, and I recently saw it again in the past week, and I don't believe it has been seen back home that much. It especially speaks to me trying to move towards a life of following the teaching from John 13:34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."
I feel there is little else I need to say about this video, as it already says so much.

So ends my sixth week, week seven, and prayer requests will soon follow.