10 Foot Truck

This is kind of fun... in a few hours, I'll be driving a 10-foot cargo truck up to Alton Bay, NH. The worship team for our winter youth retreat is apparently big enough to require a tour truck to transport all the gear. I'll be leading nine juniors and seniors as they lead 150 fellow teenagers in singing worship. There's lots of talent, which makes this a particularly fun job.

This will be my seventh Winter Teen Conference as a counselor; it will be my 14th youth retreat with BCEC youths. That means I've been to 22 total Teen Conferences if you include my time as a youth. I'm not sure when this happened, but I guess that makes me a veteran.

Anyhow, please pray for us this weekend as we hope students will come away with a greater sense of the grace of Jesus and his call on their lives.

Wedding planning is coming along... need to get invitations printed this week to stay on schedule.

Snow Days and Movement of the Heart

Took PDAS Ice Skating over Christmas

We made a practice of canceling PDAS every time Boston Public Schools flinches. It makes sense, since families can avoid the guesswork of trying to figure out when we open or close due to snow. But in the past two weeks, we've been closed for 4 days! That's a lot of days lost when you consider that a month only has about 20 days of service.

What do I do on those days off? I still put in "office time." I'm working on federal funding for our after-school snacks and coming up with a tutoring model to use in training counselors. I don't personally track attendance anymore since Kirk has taken over those responsibilities (hurrah for sharing administrative work!); but there are still plenty of loose ends to slowly tighten. Aside from administrative work, I try to use some of that time to study. Systematic Theology II is my online class and I'm trying to move forward in it so that I can keep up my status as a full time student. There's also wedding planning, which is starting to feel very imminent. I can't wait; and I'm so glad we're not doing that alone (thanks wedding planning team)!

Tonight, with the snow on the way, I spent some more time driving and chatting with K., a PDAS student. Good conversations about whether marriage is worth it and what the point of PDAS is. Sometimes I forget I'm chatting with a 6th grader who avoids homework.

There are so many little surprising things that have happened this year. Doing PDAS sometimes feels like my raw wide-eyed experience of serving in the Dorchester youth group several years ago. I don't really know how to explain the emotion except that a lot of tenderness of heart that has been absent for a few years in my ministry work is back again-- just when I thought those feelings were symptoms of youth and inexperience which I would never have again. I know better than to base my confidence in feelings; nor can I explain why sometimes they are strong while at other times they're not; but it's nice to have them.