Youth Seminars

This past weekend was "Youth Seminars" which our church hosts for this region of NY. "What is Youth Seminars?" you ask. It begins with months of preparation, a week of decoration and kicks off on Friday evening with about 400-450 teens flocking to our property.

After some amazing praise and worship, our guest speaker challenges the teens.

At the end of that service we saw hundreds stand and come to the front as a commitment to stand for God, give their lives to Him for whatever He wanted. What a sight that was.

Then we had pizza and various other teen delicacies. After this, 13 teen girls went with me back to my house where we played Guestures, ate more teen food, screamed and laughed until about 1:30. At this time one of our talented girls read a creepy bedtime story she had written with the very unsettling music from Psycho playing in the background. Asleep by 3am. Awake by 6am, and moving around at 7am.

This year's theme was "Basic Training: Defend and Serve". The teens were given workshops on the basics of defending the Bible (creationism, Jesus' deity . . . etc.), how to effectively share your faith, being a person of character and integrity, and many other topics. Here a former recovering injured serviceman tells his story of overcoming depression and alcohol after serving our country. We raised 1/3 of the money needed for a project to be done for a New York post for recovering servicemen. There are 3 more Youth Seminars to be held this year in other regions of NY - so we are hopeful that the $3,000 goal will be met.



Another service in the morning was followed by 3 sets of workshops (one of which was taught by the wonderful Pastor Ben), food, and then a wrap up session ending about 3pm.

We cleaned until 5pm, and went home to continue on our own personal busy weekend.

After a full Sunday, I am still recovering with burning, watery eyes, and Ben (my energizer bunny) is somehow at the office working - while I'm wondering where I can insert those batteries for an extra charge of energy. But we are thankful that the teens were again re-awakened and excited about the things of God.