Rainy Days, Courses, Kickoffs...

Hey ya!

Another week gone by SO fast...

This week we started our first course, Spiritual Formation, with Marv Penner. It was a super challenging week with Marv, he stretched our understanding of what it means to be spiritual and covered everything from Lectio Divina to the difference in ways that boys and girls think. He touched on some important topics such as: solitude and retreat, scripture memory, fasting, journaling, meditation, confession, personal barriers, and prayer.

During the week Marv had us go out and find our own place of solitude here at Qwanoes, and on the very last day of class we all went out and spent the whole morning as a spiritual getaway with us and God. Awesome experience! 

I really appreciated Marv's honesty and how real and open he was about his own life experiences and current happenings in his own walk of faith. It was disappointing that we only were able to spend one week with him. 

Truly the class isn't officially over, as now we all have papers and reports to finish off...:S

These last few weeks i've been attending the Lake Cowichan Baptist Church. There are four of us in total from our Kaleo group that make the awesome 45 min drive from Crofton out to Lake Cow every Sunday morning. The drive out is beautiful though, and we were given a lovely little red truck to commute in, so we all have great chats and the drive goes by fairly fast. LCB was quite the new experience at first. It's way more traditional than i'm used to back home-in that we sing mainly from the hymn book, assisted entirely by the organ player and occasionally a piano player as well. The church congregation is mainly made up of seniors, (surprisingly we had only 15-20 people in total, our first time there!) but has been growing in numbers over the last couple weeks. Our second Sunday there, we had our first youth attend. We invited her to sit in our pew after finding out that she had never gone before. After that service, we invited her to come back next Sunday and told her that we were super psyched to see her again. We weren't quite sure if she would try it again, but it was super cool to see her smiling face that next Sunday! It's our hope that we can start to bring more of the youth and teens out on Sunday mornings. We have a few musically talented members from our group, so we are planning on doing a couple Sundays a month-leading worship,etc. So maybe this will also spark an interest with them as well...

This past Friday, we had our big kick off for the Lack Cow youth kids. We had a pretty sweet turn out with about 16 or so kids there. We had home made pizzas and snacks and played some rad games-including a scavenger hunt around the church where the teams were all tied together at the wrists. I tried to talk to a lot of the kids that night and get to know them a bit more, some were more open to convo than others. A lot of these kids come from difficult and hurting backgrounds. They really need some huge love right now and just an ear to hear them out. Much prayer for these kids would be greatly appreciated!! As well as for us leaders as we work along side them and build up solid relationships with them. Because the youth group ranges from grades 7 all the way to 12, it's really hard for the older ones to fit in and not feel like the 'oldies' of the group. Some of them already weren't too keen on making a second appearance in the weeks to come. I told them how pumped I was to seeing them come back though, so we'll see if they happen try it out again. I'll be keeping you updated on what's going on in the youth group and try to get some pics up as well.

Thanks out to everyone who's been praying for me! My ankle is doing AMAZINGLY better now, so I'm super thankful about that! This next week we start our Camp Ministry course with Jim Bad as the prof. I'm not sure yet if i'll be making it home for Thanksgiving weekend, but if I do, hopefully i'll be able to touch base with most of you and catch up a bit:)

Miss you all!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!