New Year and New Opportunities

At the beginning of the New Year there were some changes made in my position as a youth worker. Before the New Year I was leading a group of 11-14 year old girls called the Tribettes. Recently, I have handed my leadership over to one of the volunteer youth workers from the church and have begun to lead a group of 15 and 16 year old boys. I have been leading this group of boys for about a month now and I am really enjoy it! I meet with the boys each Friday night where we do a variety of activities such as playing football (soccer), watching a film, and even baking. The focus of Friday night is building community amongst the group of youth. I meet with this same group of boys on Sunday mornings along with a couple of girls in this age range where the focus is on learning about God. We have just finished learning about and discussing the 10 commandments. Each time that the youth met on Sunday mornings, we dedicated that session to one of the 10 commandments. The discussions that the youth engage in are incredible. For example, a few Sundays ago we were learning about the Second Commandment, you shall not have any idols, and the youth starting discussing what an idol was. We decided that an idol is anything that we put above spending time with God. From there the discussion led to whether and Ipad, a mobile phone, or Facebook was considered a idol, because those are all things that people spend a lot more time using than spending time with God. It was a great discussion and I was very impressed with the amount of depth the youth were able to look into this commandment with. So far, each of the sessions that I have done with the youth have involved discussions that go more in depth about the topic rather than just revolving around the surface questions and statements. This is helping both the youth and myself grow in our faith, but also challenge ourselves to think more critically about the bible and our relationship with God. I am looking forward to the future activities and discussions with this group of most boys and a few girls that I will be able to be a part of. Everything has been falling into place so far and I hope that this continues to keep happening!