Man, am I beat!

This past weekend was the Winter Retreat Weekend for Mennonite Church Eastern Canada youth groups, and my church belongs to this conference. I was a youth sponsor for a few years until three years ago, when I got my now non-existent job at a call centre and ended up working night shift and weekends, so this is the first time in a while that I have been able to do something other than lead Sunday School.

I ended up going along because MCEC has a strict requirement of a 5:1 ratio of youth to sponsors on these weekends and even though Pioneer Park is not a big congregation, with the extra friends that were going along there 12 teenagers but only 2 sponsors. If they didn't have a third then there would two very disappointed people.

But then on Wednesday evening I started to get a scratchy throat and I thought “Oh no, I can't get sick! They are counting on me!”. So on Friday afternoon I did my laundry at my Mom's place and picked up a pharmacopoeia of stuff to help me make it through the weekend. As it was I still felt crappy — the call–into–work–honestly–sick crappy — and I could hardly talk all weekend. I got less sleep than normal when I should have been getting more and I still can't talk.

But you know what? I wouldn't trade this weekend for anything. Not the lack of sleep and crashing for four hours when I got home. Not the bruises from a game of tackle spatula. Not the fact that I probably extended this horrid cold by an extra few days by not getting the rest I needed. It was the best weekend I have had in a long time.

For myself, there was no question that I would go along — when I was in high school I was the only teenager at my church so I kind of got left out of the planning of the life of the community. Fortunately I was attending Rockway Mennonite Collegiate, a private high school affiliated with MCEC. If it had not been for friends there and the ability to hook up with their youth group it would have been so easy for me to have become disassociated from the church. As it was, my life throughout high school revolved around the church. Faith was evident in daily life at school, weekends were spent with friends who also went to church each Sunday, and I went to every conference youth event. I got what I needed, spiritually, from that community and is why I am not a lapsed Christan as an adult.

This is why I want to be involved with youth activities at my church. I don't lead Sunday School because I want to indoctrinate impressionable youth into what I think is the right way to interpret the Bible. I don't want the kids at church to feel left out of the community like I did, 20 years ago. I hope that simply by being there and interacting with them, showing that the church has not forgotten them and that they do not feel that same disassociation that I felt.

Oh, and you know what else? When we got to the camp where the retreat weekend was being held we found out that something had happened so the sponsor for the Calvary Church from Ayr wasn't able to go along. MCEC is quite strict abut the 5:1 youth/sponsor ratio (so I am told), so without a sponsor the three kids from Calvary wouldn't have been able to attend, but we only had twelve youth for three sponsors so we were able to absorb them for the weekend so they could be there. Double plus good.

Well, I'm up early and ready to go to the Ontario Mennonite Relief Sale in New Hamburg, Ontario. I may hate mornings (bleh!) but I'd hate even more to miss the Relief Sale! I don't believe that I have ever missed one — certainly not since childhood.

I'm going to buy some fresh made strawberry pies, help the youth from my church make those pies, and look at the quilts that will be auctioned off today. In the past, the most expensive quilts have gone for tens of thousands of dollars, so I wonder what the most expensive quilt will be this year?

In the past couple of week there were a few PPCF Youth events. The fist was the sleepover at the church on 27-28 March 2004, at which I only got two hours of sleep. The last movie they watched (Bowling For Columbine) ended at about 5:15am. I still don't know what dumb idea made me stay awake with the youth while the two ather youth sponsors went to bed at 3:00am. Though now I have verifiable proof that I need more sleep now then when I was in high school. :-) Pictures for the sleep over can be found here

The second event was the annual PPCF Easter Breakfast which the Youth plan and serve. A few weeks ago, one of the sponsors, Elgin Shantz, said that if the Youth can raise $200 dollars or more by the Easter Breakfast, the Youth could shave off his beard — which he has not been without for 25 years! Since Jacob Yantzi raised the most money, he was the one who go to do the deed. Pictures of the breakfast and shaving can be seen here.

On 9 January the PPCF Youth group went to the Canadian warehouse of Ten Thousand Villages in New Hamburg to learn a little bit about what Then Thousand Villages is for and to help pack some of the items which will be sent to outlets across Canada.

Ten Thousand Villages provides vital, fair income to Third World people by marketing their handicrafts and telling their stories in North America. The people make beautiful, high quality items from jewellery to flower pots to wicker room dividers and much, much more. Single craftspeople and cooperatives earn money to support themselves, their families and quite often to contribute to their community. Here in North America Ten Thousand Villages relies a lot on volunteers to do things like repackaging into single units the lots that have been shipped from the artisans as well as filling out orders as requested by the local stores. This helps to keep costs low to the consumer yet still provide the artisans with a decent return for their work.

We were repackaging flowerpots for shipment to local stores, and in my Pix blog you can see pictures of us at work.

#1 is Stephanie, Kathy (one of the other sponsors) and Jacob. #2 is Elgin (another sponsor), Jacob, Tyler, Steven and our supervisor for the evening. #3 is Steven showing off the mess on him from the styrofoam packing peanuts, and #4 is that mess on the floor.

This September I became one of the sponsors for the youth group at my church (Pioneer Park Christian Fellowship in Kitchener, Ontario). This past summer, I had told one of the previous sponsors, my friend David Sararus, that I would like to become involved with the youth because David and his wife, Juanita Laverty (also a friend) were going to be moving to Indiana to attend Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary and they (obviously) wouldn't be able to continue being sponsors.

I'm not sure why I volunteered to do this, just that it felt like I should. Maybe it was God calling me to do this — I don't know.

There are three other sponsors so it's not like I'm flailing around on my own, not knowing what to do. And the kids are great — I like them and I'm hoping that they like me. :-)

This past weekend was the Mennonite Church of Eastern Canada youth exchange weekend and on the drive to our host church (Living Water Community Christian Fellowship, New Hamburg, Ontario), remembering what these weekends had been like when I had been in youth group fifteen(ack!)-plus years ago, In I started to wonder just what the heck I have gotten myself in for? But you know what? It was fun! Yes, I only got 5 hours of sleep Friday night and yes, I wasn't all that thrilled about not being able to have a shower Saturday morning because we slept at the church, but all in all the experience as a sponsor was not all that different from my long ago days as a teenager. Fun games, a thought provoking speaker and (even though I am not fully comfortable with the more charismatic style) great worship with the 8 teens from PPCF, the 30+ teens from Living Waters and the 15+ teens of the second visiting youth group from East Zorra Mennonite Church in Tavistock.

I can only hope that my being a sponsor will be as meaningful for these kids as I know it will be for me, and look forward to doing this for a good long while.