Up Late/Early and Excited about What God is Doing
It’s 4:51am Thursday morning and I still haven’t fallen asleep from last night. I just too excited! Last night I had an incredible time meeting with my leaders. We had fun together and enjoyed each other’s company like a good team should, but we also accomplished a lot.
We were able to review the last year a little and even more importantly take a solid look forward with a clearly defined vision, mission, purpose, and strategy begin to define our short term and long term goals as a team.
To be honest with you though, what has me awake at this incredible hour is our conversation about the fall retreat. Last fall was the first time since I was in High School that I did not do a fall retreat. As a youth leader I have seen their overwhelming effectiveness in establishing and deepening relationships with kids, developing a deeper level of respect, connecting kids to a deeper level with God, and getting your whole group off on the right foot for the year.
As we were talking in our meeting this “little” venture of ours to take kids on a special trip suddenly became so much bigger at the suggestion that we include other groups. It was mentioned that we could team up with other scarlet thread youth centers and bring kids who weren’t going somewhere with their church, etc… I was thrilled to see my leaders thinking so big! The moment I started thinking about a retreat I was thinking “Hey wouldn’t it be awesome if we could grab as many kids as we can and make this something awesome.” But I thought maybe I was overshooting for our first round out here. Our leaders sure don’t seem to think so, and I really don’t either.
After having run 15 or 16 retreats like this throughout the course of my career I have a good idea of what something like this looks like, but I get just as excited about it as the kids do every time. And I’m sitting here now at 5:06am wishing the right people were awake that I could call to really start putting the wheels in motion on this project. Ahh, well. In the mean time, I suppose maybe I’ll just start working on promotional materials and such. 
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