When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

With our youth group we’ve been studying about decision making and how our emotions are effected. I thought when preparing the lessons, there would be little interest, but boy was I wrong. And since we began the series we have run a gambit of emotions.
The past couple weeks have covered the extremes. With a Sunday night youth service at church that everyone participated in; a Friday evening prayer vigil that was planned to go from eight in the evening until midnight but continued way beyond; and a combined Saturday night youth meeting. One week we were out every night with small group meetings, rehearsals and activities, and then, all of a sudden, to the other extreme, I was laid up for a week in a dark room after a surgery on my eyes.
Each time the teens have charge of a Sunday night service the
whole congregation loves it. The kids enjoy using their talents,
the music is more upbeat than usual, and the message is directed
more toward the youth, all of which makes everyone feel younger.
During the month of April there is a competition between the young people and adults in who can memorize more verses. The losers have to prepare and serve dinner to the winners, but then again everyone who memorizes scripture will be a winner in the long run! Right now the younger ones are in the lead.

A night of prayer was planned, and shame on me, I thought very few would come out to pray, but in the end there were almost forty that showed up.

We divided the evening up with brief studies of types of prayer (worship, confession, thanksgiving, intercession, consecration). Then, after each meditation, people went with different groups to pray according to what they had just learned and pray for specific subjects. The evening ended around one in the morning, and folks left saying that we should do this more often.
With teens, you have to have new ideas. As part of the

Bible study time, volunteers had to try the ingredients - some good, some not so good - that go into making chocolate chip cookies before mixing them in. Of course everyone got some of Sue’s cookies when we made

the application to the lesson.

And what do you do when there’s no snow for a good snowball fight? Make snowballs out of newspaper held together by masking tape. For kids that have never seen snow before, they picked up on the idea quickly!

My mom and dad moved into a retirement home (Beacon Hill in Grand Rapids) the first weekend of this month. To us, it is a relief that they are not on their own (they’re going to be ninety-five this year), but for them, after sixty years in the same house, it has to be an extremely emotional time.

To end for now, who can resist the smile on our grandson Jordan?! We miss you little guy!!