For our last youth club before we leave for the USA for a while, we had a special “Live Cluedo” night. Cluedo is the same game as Clue in the USA, and we changed it up to make a live-action version where there are no turns and everyone races each other to be the first one to solve the crime. It turned out brilliantly, especially thanks to our great cast of suspects:
The focus of the camp we helped with recently was Romans 12:1-2, and the campers worked on memorizing the verses, so Daniel worked on it, too. He got verse 2 down pretty well!
Last night we got home from several days of Munster Christian Camp’s “Inter” camp for teens in the first half of secondary school (US translation: Jr High + High School freshmen). The camp went well, despite some changes in plans… like our main speaker’s wife having a baby halfway through! It must have been hard to come back to camp and stay focused for those last couple of talks, but he did, and the students paid good attention. Camp is exciting anyway, but this one will be hard to top!
Last weekend Jess and some other ladies from church, along with help from the teen girls, put on a mother/daughter evening around the theme of modesty. It was a follow up to the night of (true) beauty they had done before, and included a fashion show to display how you can be modest and trendy at the same time. Not only was it a fun night for mums and daughters to share, but it also gave them the opportunity to chat about serious things in a safe environment. In other news, Seth was invited to speak at a meeting of the Christian Union at Cork Institute of Technology on Tuesday. It was encouraging for him to see and share with a group of students taking a stand and living out what they believe in a place where doing that is definitely counter-cultural.
Sunday afternoon Seth went to a pre-camp meeting for a youth camp we’ll be helping with at the end of the month. There are three camps for different age groups, and we’re helping with the middle one which has a long waiting list of people trying to get in! The speaker is a fellow Crossworlder whose wife is due to have a baby a few days after camp… so is this a warm up to get used to living with no sleep?
This week our Crossworld supervisor came to Ireland to see those of us that are working here and make sure we’re all ok. It’s nice to know that the organization is committed to being there for us and makes a real effort to support us. Plus it was just good to see some friends we hadn’t seen in a while! In our case, it won’t be that long until we see them again since we are getting closer to our trip to America to check in with our churches and supporters. We’ve booked our plane tickets for November 16th-February 13th. It’s already booking up and becoming obvious that we will have a busy three months, but we are definitely looking forward to the chance to see so many family and friends!
Since school has started, our weekends have included youth club on Friday evenings in our house (amazingly, the boys go to bed and sleep fine even with a house full of noisy people downstairs) then on Saturday night we’ve combined some of the Bible studies we were doing in the summer into one college-ager study on Ephesians. This last weekend we switched the two around and had youth club on Saturday in the building where our church meets so that we’d have room to host the youth club from Tramore, which is near Waterford about an hour to the east of us. We had great fun together and heard testimonies from members of both groups. It’s great to hear how God is working in other people and cities near us!
This weekend Jessica ran in a 4-mile ladies mini-marathon in Cork with some friends from Youghal. There were 10,500 women running, and most were doing it in support of charities. Jessica joined her friends in running for Feileacain, a charity that gives support to families who have experienced the loss of a new baby. She ran in memory of Mackenzy Lee Aiken, daughter of friends in Virginia.
On Sunday our church hit the road to attend an annual joint service with eight other churches from the Cork area. There were about 350 people there from the nine churches, and it was great to be able to worship together! Of course, there were also piles of delicious goodies and lots of friends we don’t see very often, which makes for a wonderful morning!
Friday Night we started youth club for the new school year! Hard to believe the summer is over, but it was great to see a few new faces and especially to see that folks were excited about coming, having a great time together, and paying attention. We think it’s going to be a good year!
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