Last night we started painting a very large mural in the big round room at the church. You may have seen the markings on the wall for where it was going to go. It went well, but lots of the youth decided to get as much paint on each other as on the wall. One of them had paint in his mouth and near one of his eyes. We got everyone cleaned up, but there was a big group that was hanging out until their ride (one of the mothers) got out of Choir practice. Since we’re not supposed to leave them alone I stayed. We actually had a pretty good conversation. One of the girls had visited with a family that is extremely charismatic. They were telling her all these things about the rapture and yelling and her. Basically they just scared her. The Methodist church doesn’t preach hellfire and brimstone very often so most of these kids had never heard anything about it before. One of them had read the Left Behind series, but everyone else was told they weren’t allowed by their parents. It was a good talk. Not bad for a non-“bible study” bible study. During the process of the conversation we found out that it was the birthday of one of the other youth. We decided to go sing him “Happy Birthday", but when we got to the house it was dark and everyone had gone to bed. They wouldn’t come to the door so we went to a group members house and called him on the speaker phone. We sang happy birthday to him that way. I’m sure he thought we were really odd.
This morning I bought a tent that was on sale at Academy with the rest of my birthday money. It’s a large 8 man tent. I’m really excited about it. Camping season is soon approaching and I hope to put it to use. I got my old tent in '93. I loaned it to some of my freshmen friends (girls) who wanted to camp in the back yard. I hadn't even taken it out except for one night in my own yard to try it out. Well they set it up and slept in it. It worked great for them and they went inside the next morning. Well it was a really windy day and got blown up into their fence where it got a rip in it. They came over that night to show me what they had done and say they were sorry. The look on their faces was so miserable all I could do was laugh. I put some duck tape on it and it’s been that was for as long as I’ve had it. It was a great tent with lots of memories. But it’s time for me to retire it. It no longer has a bag, has some mildew damage, the poles are breaking, and has the old taped up rip. Maybe I'll break it out every now and then when I really need a big tent, but that’s about it.
