Fridays are still fun

I vividly remember how excited I always was about Fridays when I was younger. Everyone was excited about the weekend, the 5th graders sold suckers for a quarter, and I looked forward to pizza and Friday night television (Full House and Family Matters!). As I grew older, it meant spending a few hours playing basketball at the Simmons Center, and eventually High School football games.

Interesting that all these years later, Fridays are still fun. It doesn't really have much to do with the weekend, but rather the activities we enjoy on this day each week in the village.

Our youth group meetings are held at our house at lunch. We eat, sing, study and play together each week. Yesterday was especially good as we had a record attendance - 15 teens (9 of whom were visitors). I was impressed by how well they all paid attention to the study, since they are joining in the middle of what we started months ago. Hopefully they will keep coming, and perhaps will begin attending our worship services as well. I introduced them to kickball yesterday, which of course they loved (and I'll admit that I had fun too). It's so great to get to spend time with these young people, and I hope that we can have a positive influence on their lives for the Lord.

We also conducted our second "movie night" on Friday. Several of the teen visitors came to this event as well, as did a few other visitors from the community (though not as many as last week). We're watching the Gospel of John, which acts out the text word for word, with no additional commentary whatsoever. It's gone well so far, and I've been especially pleased with the questions that are asked afterwards.

A lot of effort goes into set up, cooking, cleaning and tear down, and by the end of the day we're all exhausted, but it's a very good sort of tired!