YoungLives is such
an incredible ministry. It is the perfect example of God’s sovereignty and His
perfect planning. There are not many circumstances in which you would find a
college student, a teen mom, a baby, and an adult all hanging out and genuinely
enjoying their time together. God created this atmosphere that we would
otherwise see as impossible and uncomfortable. But that’s what He does, isn’t
it? He does the impossible and calls us to the uncomfortable places. Jump into
the awkward, right? We have the opportunity to do just that at every club.
Last
week we had our first club of the semester. To emphasize more unity in the
Young Life community as a whole, we decided to sync our club themes with
Fayetteville High School. So we dressed up in our 80’s workout attire and there
were tights and leg warmers galore. We were all pumped up for club and, of
course, had our 80’s playlist going full blast, a little Journey and Bruce Springsteen to start us off on
the right note. We started off with a get-to-know you game so that the girls
and mentor moms could learn something interesting about each of us three
leaders. The girls had to guess ridiculous things about us like who was once an
assistant DJ, who wants a pet elephant, and which one had Olympic aspirations.
They had a good time laughing at us, but then we turned the tables.
Christina and Rachel, two of our
leaders, got up and performed a hilarious skit introducing our next game. The
girls laughed, then were brought up front for a food eating contest. However,
this wasn’t just any food contest… This is Young Life after all! We planned a
spin-off of the sixty-second saltine cracker challenge. We tweaked it by making
the girls step up and down on an exercise stool while eating the crackers. We
even had one of our mentor moms compete with the girls. The winner was whoever
could eat the most saltines in sixty seconds. It was a lot of fun to watch and
cheer them on to the tune of “The Eye of the Tiger.” After a few announcements
about what’s to come this semester, we dived down into our club talk over Mark
1:1-20.
We talked about the ways in which the
Lord prepares us to actively live in His will. We then further discussed in
small groups what that looked like for John the Baptist, the disciples, and us
personally.
The Lord has made such an amazing way
for us and we are so excited to see what He does this year. I could not imagine
serving anywhere else and am so grateful He allows me to be a part of it.
Jessica Thornton
YoungLives college
leader
