Bowling Night
Thinking back to my years in high school; I have many memories of Sunday mornings spent helping to lead worship with the youth band, listening to Bible lessons, and enjoying lighter Sunday evening activities. These things helped me to grow in my relationship with God, opened my eyes to sins in my life and helped me to get a much better understanding of the Bible. However, the memories that I have the are more vivid are memories of events and activities that were more about building relationships with others. These times allowed me to grow closer to others in the youth group and helped to establish and grow friendships that I still hold dear today. Because of this, I view it as very important that our youth group here in Ostrava have both times of study, discussion and prayer as well as times of fun and relationship building.
Over the last two months we have been hard at work preparing for the upcoming English camp. We've been looking at some of the many different ways in which Christ served as we consider how we can serve alongside the American team at the English camp. However, two weeks ago, we took a break from this study and preparation to enjoy a night of fun and relationship building. We had our annual bowling night and spent three hours together at a local lane. Although we didn't have as many people as we would have liked, because of some illnesses and people away, those who were able to come had a great time. Another positive was that we had a girl named Anička join us for the evening. She is a close friend of Klára's and her family used to attend the church when she was young. The night ended with many of the teens going to a local tea shop to hangout. It is this kind of thing that I would like to see more and more over time that they would choose to spend time with people from Youth Revolution, not only during our regular meeting times, but just organizing hangouts on their own. Here are a few pictures from the evening.
Kuba's dabbing celebration
Seniorátní Setkání Mládeže
A little more than two years ago; this church, CB Poruba, hosted the first seniorátní setkání mládeže. It was a gathering of the different CB youth groups in the region. The purpose was to bring together the different groups in order to give them the opportunity to build relationships with one another and to encourage one another. Since that time the other five groups have hosted similar gatherings at their churches, but there hasn't been one of these gatherings in more than a year. Because of this, Barča, a girl who was once a very important part of our group, but who began attending the youth group of the CB church in her own hometown, made a big push to have CB Poruba host another of these events. Since this fall, she has been attending both our group and hers and would remind me and the rest of our group frequently that we should host this special gathering. My primary thoughts always surround our particular group, the things that they need both spiritually and relationally. But with Barča's persistence and willingness to serve we began thinking and planning for the event.
In the past, when we would organize these gatherings, all the youth leaders from the different churches would meet together and discuss and plan it, but this year has been full of other events and activities that the different leaders have been called to take part in, making it difficult to organize a time for all of us to meet together. So this time, Barča along with Míla, Robert and I thought about possible times for the event to be held and some of the things we could do. I reached out to the other youth leaders from the other churches to see if they would be interested in this gathering and if they would be willing to help in some way, but from the beginning the communication was minimal. I sent out multiple emails to the other leaders, but in many cases received no reply. Those who did respond explained that they and their other leaders were quite busy with planning for their particular English camps, but would try to encourage their youth to attend if they could. I could very much sympathize with their situations as we have been very focused on our own English camp preparations, but we decided to go forward with it.
From the beginning the task was a bit daunting, because our group is one of the smaller groups and Robert, who originally agreed to do the cooking for the event soon realized that he would not be able to be there because of a family vacation to Spain. We then enlisted the help of Táňa to do the cooking, but she realized about two weeks ago, that she too would be away during the time of the event. The uncertainty of the food situation, along with the lack of positive responses for help from the other leaders left both Barča and I feeling a bit overwhelmed. With two weeks to go, the situation did not look very good. We only had 15 people registered to attend, half of those people being from our group, we only had one other the other leaders signed up to lead one of the six discussion groups that we had planned for second day of the event, we had no idea how we were going to deal with the issue of food and I was struggling to find direction in my preparation for the main message of the event. It left me wondering, "God, where are you?" The funny thing is that this was the planned topic for the event itself, so as I was struggling to prepare a Bible lesson on the topic, I was feeling it in a very practical way.
But our God is one of faithfulness and power and He showed these qualities very clearly over the last two weeks. After hearing that Táňa could not handle the food, I prayed and reached out to the church. A group of women in the church offered to help make guláš, cakes and spreads for the event. In one week, we went from having 15 people registered to having 54 people registered. We again reached out the other churches and got three more people to lead the discussion groups. And after several days of struggling with the direction of the main message, I received clarity on the topic last Monday and managed to put it all together that day after waking up very early to teach a couple of English lessons in the morning.
On Friday night, the event had finally arrived and although I was still unsure of how everything would come together I was amazed to see how God's faithfulness and power was displayed. First, each young person from our group took charge of a particular service during the event and did a wonderful job. Eliška and Honza handled registration and money at the door, greeting our guests and directing them to where they could place their things for sleeping. Kuba and Barča were there early to help set things up for when people began to arrive, but they also had other responsibilities. Kuba, the youngest of our group, was the MC for the event and did a wonderful job helping me to keep things on schedule, starting the event off by leading the group in prayer, but also keeping things light, fun and upbeat throughout the course of the two days. Barča, who had done a lot of the pre-event planning also helped to lead worship along with some of the members of her home church's youth group and frequently came to me asking what she could do to help during the event. Matouš excellently planned and led the icebreaker activities and helped to setup tables for the dinner. Klára helped her mom with serving the food and cleaning up after the dinner. And Eliška took a big step of faith by sharing her testimony, even though her hands were shaking the entire time. Not only did they take on these planned responsibilities, but they also did a great job engaging the youth of the other churches, making them feel welcome.
The Holy Spirit really empowered my message as it really seemed to reach the hearts of many of the people there by both challenging and reassuring those young people. The Spirit was also very present during the discussion groups as people discussed, where is God when: they are struggling to prioritize their time, when they are single, when they are struggling to fit in, and when they are having troubles at home. The youth were open and shared their different struggles with each other at times bringing tears, but in the end bringing encouragement and direction.
There are other things that I could mention from the event and I'm sure that there are many other wonderful things that happened that I may not know about until we reach heaven. God showed Himself to be faithful, powerful and present during this event and I pray that it would be a huge source of encouragement as the school year comes to an end and these young people take part in different camps and go away on vacation. Would you praise God along with me for all that He has done? And would you pray that these young people would continue to grow closer to God and continue to lift each other up as they go into the future?
Here are a few pictures from the event
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