Christmas Letter 2013

Merry Christmas Family and Friends,

This year my discipleship girls and I sat down and wrote out our favorite memories together from 2013.  It was fun to hear them recollect the things we had done over the past year.  This letter is a collection of paragraphs of what each of them had to say about the past year.

Hi, I am Alexa Sapphire Weaseltail.  I am a member of Hope Fellowship Church.  My favorite part of 2013 was in the summer when we built a shed at the new church building.  I also remember in the summer when we floated down the Yakima River.  We played a game in the river where we raced upstream to the closest branch.  I also love singing with Heather and being a leader at Sunday Church.  My favorite songs to sing are: On Jordan’s Stormy Banks, Our God, More Love, Soon and Very Soon, and Amazing Grace.

Hello, my name is Yaanibaah Starr Singer.   I am 14 and I am in the 9^th grade.  2013 hasn’t really been good, because I have had a family member pass away.  It was sad, because they were very close to me.  But after all that has happened I have had really close friends that supported me and made me feel special and loved.   I am really glad that I have them.  I have had some really good times at youth group with all of them because they support me every time I go there.  Over this year I have been nice to a lot of people because I am thankful for a lot of things and I am thankful I turned to the Lord.

Hello, my name is Justine Andrade.  I am 13.  The best part of 2013 was my birthday with the d-group at Dairy Queen.

My name is Miranda Dehart.  The best thing that was fun about this year was when we did work on the [church] building.  When that happened I got paint in my mouth.  My favorite part of Hope Fellowship Youth Group is coming together and singing and praying together.  I have learned that Jesus died on the cross for us and sacrificed for us on the cross.

Hello, my name is Judy Bergevin.  I’m in 8^th grade and my favorite part of 2013 was meeting all the interns over the summer.  I miss everyone that I met over the summer because they meant a lot to me.  I got complimented on art so I got inspired to be an artist. I’m in art class and doing I’m doing hard tasks. 

My name is Whitney Lewis.  This year I really liked being in the Harrah Parade (with the youth group).  I really liked my birthday and Halloween and Easter.  I am in Heather’s D-group.

My favorite memories surround my d-group girls.  I have loved having the girls in my home this year for d-group, or slumber parties or just for the weekend when they needed a place to stay.  My house feels more complete when it is full of girls. 

We are very eager to get into our new church building in January.  Hardly a week goes by without one of the youth or children asking about the progress on the building.  The building will multiply our options for outreach.   It will be a safe haven for children and youth throughout the week.  We are in the midst of raising funds for a playground, basketball court, volleyball court, and playing fields to complete the facilities.  Pray with us for the completion of our building and facilities as we enter a new year.  Thank you for all of your love and support.

Diary From the Weekend

Friday Afternoon at 5:15 Chris closes are staff meeting in prayer and 5 minutes later I am cranking up the 15 passenger van to start picking up my youth girls.  (All girls in our youth group are my girls) First things first, I turn the air on full blast.  We only have one setting on the air- off or full blast.  Today I am thankful it is full blast because I have been in the van for 30 seconds and i can feel the sweat gathering behind me knees.  For the next hour and a half I am driving through housing projects, down long driveways and onto dirt roads.  Finally we have our crew and we arrive at the church building in just enough time to wash the truck and trailer for our float in the morning.  The guys are already at work assembling the giant Mt. Adams that makes up our float.  In a half hour we are out of day light and we gather around the fire pit to roast hotdogs and eat s'mores.  Because it is Friday the 13th, the boys are coming up with creative ways to scare everyone.  Chuck even bought color packets to casually throw into the fire to make it change colors.  The boys are camping out at the building in tents, but the girls are all coming back to Veronica and my house.  We load up in the van and I can hear whispers and the voice of a boy under the seats.  I pretend I don't notice and pull away from the building, up the long driveway.  The boy suddenly pops out from under the seats.  "I'm in here! Let me out!" I keep driving, I hear the panic in his voice.  I giggle to myself and keep driving until I am sure he has learned his lesson.  I stop open the doors and let him run all the way back down the driveway to the safety of the other boys.

Back at my house the 12 girls find places to sleep.  Then we pull out the nail polish and eat popcorn and red vines.  No matter what age group is staying at our house, interns, high school, middle school or elementary age girls, they all love painting nails.  So we had 14 of us ranging in age from 11-28 and everyone enjoys a new coat of polish on their toe nails and finger nails.  At 10pm the hair straighteners come out, and half the girls straightened hair before bed.  At 11 we start moving for bed. Half of the girls decided to move to a different bed than they had first chosen.   At 12:30 I was fixing a curtain that had fallen down because of too much moving around in the room.

At a quarter to 8 I hear some of the girls beginning to wake.  I almost have breakfast ready- blueberry muffins, bacon, peaches, and orange juice.  As the girls begin to rise we eat breakfast in shifts, because there is not room for everyone at the table. They take turns rotating through our one bathroom.  At 9:30 we are out the door and in 15 minutes we are on site assembling our float. As we hang streamers and attach balloons more and more kids from the youth group keeping arriving to help.  Finally it is parade time and we are ready.  Buckets of candy are in place.  The walkers are ready to go and for the next 40 minutes we march down the main street in Harrah, tossing candy to those who came to watch.  We won a trophy! After the parade there is a festival in the park.   We take the youth over to get a bite to eat.  Everyone is exhausted, so we don't stay long.  We load up back into to steaming 15 passenger van and begin the drop off process.

Finally At 3:30 I am pulling back into my driveway still with one youth who is staying the weekend with me.  We start to clean up the disaster in the house, but soon we collapse on the couch and watch High School Musical.  Another youth comes over to join us.  She has not been involved in youth ministry for the past year and we have missed her.  I am so happy she is with us.  At dinner she grabs my arm arm and lays her head on my shoulder.  I smile.  I am so glad she is coming back to us again.   We venture out a few hours later to find some ice cream.  We take it over  the the Granberrys for a little ice cream party.  They have a few extra little ones staying with them as well.  The party doesn't last long because we are all tired and ready for bed.

Sunday morning is calm and relaxing.  We eat a late breakfast and before we know it we were eating lunch.  After lunch we head over the the Granberrys to get ready for Sunday night church.  They have other youth from the community already there.  Most of them spend the afternoon having a water balloon war.  Mary and I are cooking with some help from one of the youth. Before long we are on our way to the long house to set up for church.  We arrive and as we are unloading we have the excitement of getting a squirrel out of the long house.  You never know what might be awaiting you when you open the doors of the long house. There have been many surprises over the years, dead and alive.  Soon the buses start coming and people start arriving.  It was a relatively normal night of church. besides the thunder and lightning storm that was going on outside during church.  After church, clean up goes fast with the help of the youth.  I say farewell to the youth and remind them of the game night we are having on Tuesday.

I get home at 10pm almost ready to crash.  I eat a late snack, because I don't rarely eat any dinner on Sundays.  I think through the weekend.  I am so thankful for what I get to do.

Who's Bus is it?

Last week at Church I was setting the dining room for dinner with the help of 10 year old LaShae.  As we were setting, Veronica pulled up in the big school bus full of kids and youth coming to church and LaShae asked me, "Whose bus is that?  Is it Veronica's Bus?"  I told her,"no" that it wasn't really Veronica's bus it was the Church's bus.  She thought for barely a second before she responded, " Oh, so that's our bus."  "Yes," I said, "That's our bus."  Her next questions was, "How did we pay for it? I got to explain to her how people from churches all over the country gave money so that we could buy it, and she thought that was really cool.    It was neat to hear her include herself in the church.  She didn't say "Oh, so its Sacred Road's bus." She said, "Its our bus."  She knew if it was the church's bus  it belonged to her too, because she is part of the church.  

The Power of Prayer

       I read recently in the By Faith Magazine an article by Paul Miller about prayer.  He says Christians struggle so much with prayer that only 10% of believers clim to have an effective or meaningful prayer life.  I was not surprised by the statistic at all.  I myself am part of the 90% without a meaningful prayer life.  I know as a fact that Sacred Road would not be seeing the change in people's hearts and the growing church in White Swan if it were not for the prayers of God's People.  But my cynical heart says to me that God is going to do what he's going to do despite people's prayers,  and of all the people that have committed to pray for Sacred Road and the people in White Swan  only 10% are really praying anyway.  So what difference is it making anyway.  I am assuming that because I because I am not in constant prayer, looking for the presence of the Lord in everyone, nobody else is either.  In his book on prayer Paul Miller writes, " There is a disconnect between what I present and who I am.  My words sound phony, so other's words sound phony too.  In short my empty religious performance leads me to think that everyone is phony. "  Even if the statistic is true, that only 10% of Christians are really praying, why does my heart doubt that those prayers are making a difference.

       In my discipleship group we are going through a small book by Patricia St. John on prayer.  It describes what prayer is, who we are talking to, why we should pray, and how and what we should pray.  My girls are never excited to volunteer to pray during small groups and I did not want them as young believers the same idea that I have about prayer- that it doesn't really work or matter.  I knew I needed to learn to pray just as much as they did.  Last week at small group on Tuesday I took prayer requests as normal and I prayed for them to close out our time together,  One girl has asked for prayer to get better, because she was sick.  You could hear in her voice she had a cold.  On Thursday, when we got together for d-group, out of the blue the same girl says, " Oh ya, I wanted to tell you that prayer thing really works.  I am getting better.  My cough is almost gone."  I was shocked.  At first I found my cynical heart telling me that she was going to get better anyway.  It wasn't really the prayer that helped. I had just stripped the Lord of any power he had in making Justine better, plus the work he had done in her heart to believe,  I am so thankful that the Lord uses my girls to point out my unbelief and that he is not letting my unbelief be contagious to them.  He is teaching me and them the power of prayer.

Picture Update

Last Thursday we had a game night with the youth group.  We had 45 kids come and compete in teams against each other in olympic style competitions.  Here are a couple pictures of some of the events below.

Each team had a blindfolded team member feed them a bowl of pudding.  First one done was the winner,.

We had a jelly bean flavor guessing competition, but some of the jelly beans had flavors like barf, dirt, grass, and rotten egg. 

Levander and Forrest are trying to guess their jelly bean flavor.

Josiah got the jelly bean that tasted like dirt.  

Latisha was hoping she got a bad flavored jelly bean, but instead she got green apple. 

The diamond team pyramid collapsed.

I think Zach's jelly bean tasted like booger.

team pyramid

The heart team one a 100 point bonus for being the first team to rotate their pyramid 360 degrees without falling.

Team members had letters on the bottom of their feet and they had to spell the word the fastest.

On Friday Night my d-group had a slumber party at my house.  We had fun playing games, painting nails and watching the cartoon "Despicable Me".  We also celebrated Whitney's 14th birthday.

Even in the Darkness

"Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths,^[a] you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
 even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me

    and the light become night around me,”

even the darkness will not be dark to you;

    the night will shine like the day,

    for darkness is as light to you."

Psalm 139:7-12

I remember so vividly memorizing this Psalm for my 3rd grade sunday school class.  I can picture myself leaning up against the wall  outside the Sunday school room on Sunday morning trying to learn the verses well enough to recite them to the my teacher, who happened to be my aunt.  I remember while I was learning it I had the picture in my head of a child  sitting on a bed in a room all by himself.  Every time I hear Psalm 139 I see that same picture.  Most of the time, when I am in dark days, I feel alone.  The last few months have felt like dark days.  One thing I can't comprehend, though, is how close the Lord has been to me.  I am not alone and I don't feel alone.  I hear Him say to me,  "The same things that break your heart, are breaking my heart too."  

I Love the Lyrics to the J.J. Heller song Your Hands:

I have unanswered prayers
I have trouble I wish wasn't there
And I have asked a thousand ways

That you would take my pain away (or sometimes I sing "other people's pain")
You would take my pain away

I am trying to understand
How to walk this weary land
Make straight the paths that crooked lie
Oh Lord, before these feet of mine
Oh Lord, before these feet of mine

When my world is shaking, heaven stands
When my heart is breaking
I never leave your hands

Sometimes are pain will never go away on this side of Heaven, but he never stops holding us. Heaven Stands. Even in the darkness he is there.