Day 50– Aug 18, 2005, Thursday: Leading Youth Group at Kalhikiola Church

Today started off fantastically with pancakes and bacon. The pancakes even had bananas sliced up so they were kind of caramelized. After that we had a little quiet time where we each spent some time with God (a great start to the day as well). Then we realized that we would be leading youth group at church tonite so we scraped together a plan to do some games, a skit, and some talking.

Then we cleaned. On the left is a shot of the wall before and after. The photo doesn't do it justice. Scrubbing walls. Scrubbing ceilings. Scrubbing floors. We are quite sick of cleaning, but we turned on some music and made the best of it. This house is actually getting clean. The house has really old double hung windows, the kind with ballast weights. I was trying to fix one of those and slipped with a razor blade and sliced my pinky quite deep. (right now my brother just fainted by reading this). The two nurses immediately jumped into action. They bandaged it up with all kinds of fancy medicine. They were appalled when I told them that I would have remedied it with toilet paper and duct tape. But now, I am trying to type with this massive bandage on my pinky. It really disrupts the rhythm.

Well, later in the day we got together again and finalized our plans for youth group, and then we walked off to the church. It was a beautiful walk. About a mile. Jonny especially enjoyed it because Rod and I carried him the whole way. We got to the church about ½ hour early and just walked around admiring it and praying for the area. This church is really old, and back in the 1800’s there were over 5000 people that met here weekly. Now there are less than 100 and about 10 in the youth group. Then about 7:00 the kids and pizza showed up. We all had a great time. The skit went well. Rod and Megan did a great job sharing about how we find our identity in God rather than others. They also talked about how God picked each of us for a specific job, and even brought our team together from all across the world to minister to people in Uganda.

After that we played. We had a lot of balloons; the best part was just dumping them all out and popping them all. Then we played broom ball. Jonny thought it was the funnest thing in the world. He is really loving competition these days. Overall, it was a great night, now we are back here playing phase 10 and going to bed.

Here is a shot of Jessika's favorite surprise...a filly came by (with a few riders on horses). This was the friendliest young horse ever. Jessika was giving her loves.


Here is the broom ball game with the youth group. Lots of fun.