St. Paul's Winter Retreat

I feel like I am finally able to exhale after quite a bit of planning for our youth group's winter retreat. *whew* The past week especially was filled completely with planning for the retreat, and being overly anxious about how it would turn out. It was such a learning experience for me and I was constantly taken back by how much time and planning goes into planning a retreat. I feel like overall the retreat was a success. Only a couple of bloody noses, no major discipline issues, and 23 tired kids on the drive home are all marks of a good weekend! It's funny, as a youth leader, you always know that people will give you a hard time for something no matter what you do, it's just that you are never sure what it will be. I have a theory that the shelf life of youth leaders is so short is because they are the easy scapegoat, they lend themselves to excellent for venting at, and perhaps most importantly they work with teenagers. So before every event, I try to prepare myself for this, but usually I am completely surprised at what becomes and issue for the students and volunteers. This time I was prepared to defend my choice of the band for the weekend, or maybe not upholding the right traditions, but I never expected to catch as much flak for forgetting mayo for sandwiches! Haha, they keep you guessing. Oh well. All in all, things went very well and the kids had a really great time. Our theme was the winter olympics. Our programming involved devotionals, teachings and small groups that were based off of the athletic metaphors that Paul used in the New Testament. Our games and activities also were loosely based on winter olympic games.

Here the students are participating in the bobsledding event. Instead of sleds and ice, we had tarps and grass.

Here is our biathlon event where we substituted phone books and dowels for skis and poles and nerf guns and a white board for real guns and targets.

Other games that we did included snowboard slalom (scooters), curling(a frisbee and a masking tape target), a snowball fight (marshmallows), skiing slalom (tying legs together with rope), and beach volleyball (not really a winter olympics event, but made a guest appearance because the weather was so mild! We also had a bon fire and midnight madness, which were game that were played in the dead of night. We played capture the flag, sardines and ghost in the graveyard out in this field of bushes around midnight. Everyone had their flashlight and it was a lot of fun!

We had three "countries" represented this past weekend. Two midhigh groups and one senior high group. The senior high group was the USSR, the first midhigh group was Jamaica, and the group that Brittany was in was Pinkolympia. They were all girls. Each team also got bandanas to help represent their teams.

This is our group enforcing "sandlot" rules while playing beach volleyball. Basically the rule is, "you hit it, you get it!" One of the students hit the ball over the fence and into a mesquite patch, so they had to get it while everyone delighted in that students pain in trying to retrieve the ball from the thorny mesquites.

This is our group from the weekend, they were great! Had such a good time!

Brittany and I have spent yesterday afternoon and evening and all of today recovering, which we really enjoyed and needed. It's good to be breathing again! We love you all so very much!