My Experience as Youth Pastor

Wow, I really need to figure out my schedule and make time for this blog again. September was murder. In one week I had the See You At the Pole rally, SYATP at 4 places plus an interview for substitute teaching in one morning, and Awakening Fest/Revolve Tour in the same weekend.

I took 19 teens with me to Awakening Fest, which is a day long Christian music festival. It was cold and raining all day but we had tons of fun anyways. Well, it was tons of fun till I sat down for a few minutes, then the cold set in and I thought about rounding everyone up and leaving, but we all wanted to stay for Skillet so we stayed shivering till after their show ended. Fortunately I met a really cool guy named Joe Baker from Live Offensively at the merchandise table. I bought a shirt from them and he gave me a shirt. Then he let us run around with light swords and fight. It was absurdly fun and I ended up getting down right hot after 10 minutes so I was doing much better when Skillet came on.

Revolve Tour was the same weekend so my wife went up with 9 to that event. It is a girls only youth convention. I heard they had fun but I can't say much except to say I never want to do two events in the same weekend again even if I'm not attending both. Logistics and planning are bad enough one at a time.

The following weekend we had our "Unsale" which was a free yard sale for our community. It went really well for our first up. We had 26 people come by for free stuff representing 69 in their households and we gave away almost $400 in stuff at "yard sale" prices, so that is quite a bit of stuff. We also sold nearly $200 worth which will be split between the men's and women's homeless shelter in town. I learned a lot about what people are needing based on what people bought and asked for. I want to host this event semiannually so it is time to start planning for the spring. I'd like to see this more than double by then.

I also installed cameras for our daycare/preschool last week and had a few student "emergencies" to deal with so it was the busiest week I think I've ever had.

This is the first week I've been able to take much time off. I have actually worked everyday and won't be getting time off but I've taken afternoons off all week except Monday when I took the morning off. The previous 4 weeks I put in 80+ hours each week and this week I'll have a little over 40 hours so it is practically a vacation.

Anyways, in Youth I've been having a problem with some of the students running off before and after service to the hospital parking lot. Last night I went over 2 times to ask them to come back over and explained both times that their parents expect them to be at the church and that I cannot provide any measure of security for them if they aren't on our property. I think they didn't believe anything could happen because a third time they slipped off and went up where I couldn't see them. That is when they got robbed at knife point. I didn't tell them "I told you so" because they were more than a little shaken. The one that got robbed wouldn't let em call the cops. I was going to go talk to the guys that robbed them if they were there but they stopped me, so I pulled out my phone and dialed 911 and they begged me to hang up so I did and found out the kid was afraid that they knew who he was. The mom did file a report despite his pleading and the muggers stole a car shortly after the incident and got in a high speed chase which ended in a crash. The police recovered the property the same night amazingly. Hopefully the students will understand when I ask them to stay on the property from now on.

So that is the last few weeks in a nutshell. It has all been a bit of a blur. I'll try to make some more regular posts now that the evil month is over.