Shhh...the kids are sleeping!

At the end of Monday...

Oh my goodness! We are exhausted, delirious, cheerful, connected and ready to go back tomorrow for some more.

By the end of the day at the food bank we had boxed up 12,588 meals worth of food. That's almost 1,600 meals each!! (We moved 33264 pounds worth of food.) You would be amazed at how hard these kids worked and at how well they worked together. One of our goals for the week was for the kids to open up and begin to build friendships with kids they don't normally connect with at church. We are definitely seeing a lot of that happening on this trip!!

At the Food Bank they worked hard at different jobs. We took turns, but the jobs included: Stockers - their job was to keep the table filled with the various foods that went into the boxes (ours were all food items), Assemblers - each person had two or three different items they put in the box (from cereal boxes to canned goods to pasta/rice), one person weighed them to make sure they had everything, one person taped them closed and another person moved them to the pallet. You wouldn't believe how quickly they put systems in place so it would run most efficiently! We were all shocked when we heard our final numbers.

We then came back and took showers before heading to the movie. We saw, "How to Train Your Dragon." They discussed how they would turn it into a tv show on the way back to the church. We have some future scriptwriters, producers and directors in our youth ministry.

The church provided homemade cookies and milk for us upon our return. We enjoyed them very much. Be sure to ask your kids about the minute of silence before they could eat their cookies. We eventually gave it to them for 28 seconds of silence. The adults were laughing so hard!

Our devotions are going very well. Tonight we talked about how we can be a more welcoming youth group. We looked at Acts 2:42-47 and talked about how we can be more like those in the early church. We really have an incredible group of kids. I'm going to sleep tonight with a smile on my face thinking of all that they are doing and saying!

I'm trying to include a video the kids made for you - it makes me laugh just thinking about it! Check my facebook if it never shows up here.

Have a great week...hope to have kids update some in the morning!

Michele