P T D S D

POST TRAUMATIC D-NOW STRESS DISORDER:

(The following post may be lengthy, but hopefully entertaining. Lots of pictures involved. I got lots to say fellow bloggers. Please don’t leave because there is lots of reading, just bear with me.)

What is this you may ask? Well let me tell you.

I have just finished spending the last; oh lets say 48 hours with lots and lots of teenagers! I also just finished spending the last two months or so planning this event with some really awesome people. (Hi people!!)

Non-stop people, non-stop!

We just held our annual D-Now (Discipleship Now Weekend) at our Church along with another local Church. We ended up with around 150 kids and around 50 adults helping. I had a host home which took care of six 8th grade girls from Friday afternoon until today after church. Y’all we really had a blast.

Our theme this year was Identity. Do you know your identity in Christ? Well do you?
We also integrated learning about mercy into knowing who you are in Christ.

Ephesians 2:4-5

4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved

Let me give you a rundown of our schedule:

1. We met at the church, and had dinner. Chicken breast, Baked taters, green beans, and cake. The chickens and taters were cooked be my wonderful Husband, and the rest of the food was taken care of by our wonderful kitchen committee at Church.

2. Then we went in to the Youth Room where they watched a PowerPoint presentation, made by yours truly. It was lots and lots of pictures from when the youth were little. It was so cute watching their reactions when they realized it was them. (They had no clue we were doing this)

3. Then we had our guest of honor for the evening. “Mr. Jeff Foxworthy” came by to play “Are You Smarter than a Teenager” with us.

We also had commercial breaks during the game show, which involved this.

4. Then we went to the sanctuary for worship with the wonderful Mr. Seth Worrel. (By the way that was him playing are you smater than a teenager) He once was a member of our youth group, has since grown up, and became a missionary in Afghanistan. He also went to the Southern Seminary, and now lives in Louisville Kentucky with his lovely wife Anita. They are expecting there first child this spring/summer. We had a wonderful time worshiping.

(I just love watching youngens worship. They just make my heart melt.)

5. Then we went home, Lorie (our leader, and my wonderful Sunday School Teacher), myself (at this point saying this is going to be a piece of cake), and the girls. It was about 10:30, at night. We still had another Bible study to do, and then hoped we (Lorie and I) would get to sleep, but nooooo we had to do this.

note: I normally don't let the children play with knifes. But I took pictures just in case they got hurt. ;-)'

don't ask not sure why they did this

6. So we wake up (finally), and Lorie, my daughter Jessie, and I make the little sweet children breakfast.

Now let me stop and tell you a little bit about breakfast. We had another Bible lesson that morning so we integrated the lesson and breakfast together. (Word of the day: integrated) Three of the girls wore a sticker the others did not. The ones with the stickers had to put their hands behind their back and could only eat if the others had mercy on them and fed them. Some children did not like this (hmm hmm Sydney) because they thought everyone else would eat all the bacon before she got any. It was a good lesson for them (Sydney) to see.

7. Now here is where the real fun begins. We get to the Church and find out we are doing a YouTube Scavenger hunt. We had to do all this really neat stuff. We had to find out 3 peoples perception of God, make a video sharing the gospel, find an old lady who had fallen and could not get up, order a cheeseburger no cheese with a diet water. Ya know fun stuff like that. Now I’m sure your thinking, “oh that does sound like fun, especially with those precious teenage girls”. Well we didn’t just have the 8th grade girls. I showed mercy on another group who did not have a driver, and were going to be split up; so I integrated them into ours.

Dun, dun, dun the 8th GRADE BOYS. So now we have 12 teenagers, boys and girls. This my friends is a recipe for disaster.

(This above picture was right after the boys pretty much fell out of the van. They thought I had stopped the van, when I did not, I came to a rolling stop to talk to someone. They decided to hop out of the back of the van at the same time I decided to pull away. Ahhhhhhhh, hair turning grey, Kim when is my next hair appointment!)





Now things didn't go that bad (with the exception of that one incident), it just got a little stressful trying to pull together all the kids to do the videos. By the way I will upload video of our scavenger hunt when I figure out my camara. :)'

8. So next we came back to the church and did our handprints and had prayer time. We split into two different groups, the younger teenagers, aka junior high, and the older ones, aka senior high.

The following two I think are my favorite. :)













They both have the same thing "I am an enemy of the devil 1 Peter 5:8"

9. After this we watched everybody's scavenger hunts, all 15 teams. It took us about 3 1/2 hours. Oh my goodness we were so tired. So we went home, I thought to go to bed since we had to back at the church at 8:30 this morning. But no we had to do this.

I think I gained 10 pounds this weekend. :(

So I am sure your saying by know get to the point Valarie, what does this have to do with the title of this post.

I was so tired after Church and then going to my Daddy's for dinner, that when I got home, I took a nap. While I was taking my nap, I had the wierdest dream. I dreamed of little people filming weird things in front of local schools, and me getting in trouble because I forgot to do something I was assigned to do. That is the stress from the weekend just running through my mind people.

Now the forgetting something really did happen by the way. I didn't get in trouble, but I did forget something. I forgot to get the paint for the handprints!!! But God and my dear husband saved me. Logan went and got the paint for me while we were doing the scavenger hunt and when he bought it, it had been marked down from $8.99 a gallon to $2.99 a gallon. Isn't God good. :)

God was all over this weekend and we all had a really wonderful time of worship and fun!!!





The End :)'