10! Can you believe it?? 10!!!

Oh yes, I am excited! So excited that I couldn't wait to get the pictures posted, we had 10 kids at our youth group last night. Then, to top it off, I wish you would have seen them get into the lesson. Our lesson books are called "God-colored glasses" and I am EXTREMELY excited about it. It is showing these kids that the opinions they form right now are going to shape their thinking for the rest of their lives. Last night, the lesson pretty well introduced the concept, you had to really think about these questions: "Who are you?" Where did you come from?" "Where are you going?" "Why are you here?" Some of them have thought about that a lot, some not so much. Last night, they did though.

I was telling them that when I was their age there was a lot of craziness in my life. When I was a freshman in high school, my mom was really sick, the doctors told me and my 24 year old sister that it was very likely she would not make it- my dad had died just 11 months earlier. I was saved, my whole family was saved. I knew my dad was in heaven, I knew that was where my mom would go but I had to ask God, "Why me?" I took the stance of feeling sorry for myself in a big way, there was times that I should have been praying for my mom to get better that I was too busy being mad at God for putting me there. Now, as I have gotten older, when bad things happen, I have to look at it differently, I still say "why?" but it's not a self-pity thing, it is a "what am I supposed to learn from and do about this?".

I told the kids last night, I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of my purposes in life was to be THEIR leader and teacher. Because of the things that happened in high school in my life, that time is magnified. I remember most things, good and bad like it was yesterday. And I told them, I didn't feel like he put me on this earth to be A youth group leader but specifically for every person that walked in that door last night. God put us all in that place for a reason. I LOVE those kids. I think the greatest thing though, is they love being there too. God gave us relationships and good ones, I had 4 of these kids at my house before AWANA last night, at any given time I will have some of them there. I think probably one of the greatest things that has ever been said to me was said last week at Awana. One of my kids (and it wasn't Robert) said they were talking to their friends about who they would call if they ever got in enough trouble to go to jail. The one person said "I told them I would call Mindy Browning, she wouldn't bail me out, but she would know I would be scared, and I know she would come and at least sit in the building because I was there."

That's my purpose in life.