I’m waiting for the last batch of sauce to finish simmering. Tonight I made 10 batches of the wine sauce for the Mission’s Dinner at church. On Friday I will be making 7 dozen roasted pears to go with it. If you are doing the math, that’s dessert for about 100 people. I’m not a gourmet cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I love cooking for the Mission’s dinner for 2 reasons: 1. I get to try and cook foods I normally wouldn’t make and 2. I get to try and make said food for 100+ people. It’s a challenge, it’s a ton of work and it’s hanging out in an outdated kitchen for over 12 hours chatting with friends and having a good time.

I went tubing with the youth group today. It was the kind of tubing where you just float down the river. Our first trip was the short trip. It’s about a mile long and takes about a half-hour. It was fun but it was also overcast and a little cold so we were glad the river was moving fast and the trip didn’t take too long. Then we stopped for a lunch. After lunch we headed out for the long trip. They drop you off 5 miles up river and it takes about 3-4 hours to get to the end, depending on how fast the river was moving.

Since Lexi was born I haven’t been able to do to much with the youth group so it was great to be able to go with them today. Tubing is one of those trips that doesn’t require much of the leaders other than floating and chatting with people, which is what I really wanted to do since I haven’t seen some of the kids all summer long. It was fun to catch up and hang out.

The downside of the day was despite putting on sunblock (twice) I still managed to burn. My chest and shoulders are burnt and my legs from my knees to the middle of my calves are fried. Except for a few spots on my knees - it looks like I put stickers or something on my knees to keep the sun off. Weird.

Last week, I went with Messiah’s Youth to Rapid city, South Dakota to work with Bob Dudley and the Lakota Indians that live on the Pine Ridge Reservation. It was a great week. We met a lot of really fun people - some from the Pennsylvania Church Army and some that lived in Rapid City or the smaller town of Red Shirt Table. Overall, it was a very laid back week. The culture of the Lakota is in general very relaxed. We never did any real work until 2 or 3 in the afternoon and the work we did do was mostly things like, grilling food for a town barbeque, setting up chairs and tables, practicing skits and worship music, driving around and handing out fliers to invite people to the services and the pow-wow. Pretty simple and non-taxing chores. But the fact that there was little pressure made it fun. We were able to enjoy the week as a team and not be tired and crabby with each other. Since we had less physical work to do, we were able to sit down and chat with the people who lived there, sometimes for a whole evening. One of the girls on the trip met a lady who was one of the dancers in Dances With Wolves.
Thursday night, we held a pow-wow in Red Shirt Table. Red Shirt is a town of about 15 houses, so the fact that there was a pow-wow there was a really big deal.
Anyway, Bob lead the pow-wow and it was very cool to see. He has a great ministry in South Dakota. Instead of telling the Native Americans that they need to give up their culture and their traditions, he shows them how they can use their traditions to worship God. For example, at the pow-wows, he talks about dancing for the Lord and talks about how David danced and how dancing is a form of worship. So, all these people come to the pow-wow, the drummers, the singers, the dancers, and everything in sung in Lakota and the dancers are all wearing traditional dress, but they are all dancing for the Lord. When we were there, there were more kids than adults dancing. And the kids danced hard. They were mostly under 7 years old and they danced almost the entire evening.
We were invited to dance as well. They had several intertribal dances and circle dances that everyone participates in and during these dances, the experienced dancers dance along side a new comer and show them how to dance. My friend and I held the hands of a 6 year old girl named Hannah. About half way through the song, Hannah let go of our hands and said, “It’s not hard, do you think you can do it by yourselves
now?” Then another little girl, Stevanya, danced by us (by the way, Stevanya is a princess, meaning she is one of the top dancers in her age group) and told us we were making it look hard. Gotta love kids.
We were only there from Sunday to Friday, but I was talking to another one of the leaders on the way home and we both agreed that it would have been great to stay another 2 weeks, just to be able to talk to the people more and really get to know them and hear their stories.

Friday night was the Senior High Girls Sleepover. We decided to have the girls over to my house for a slumber party and to talk about eating disorders and self-image (a topic we touched on at youth group but didn’t go very deep). Anyway, it was a very eye-opening experience. I can’t say much because of confidentiality but I can say this - I discovered that every girl has been teased, picked on, or thought badly of herself because of her body image. No matter if they are big, small, skinny, tall, short, whatever, everyone felt bad about the way they looked. As one girl put it Friday night “no matter what we do, we just can’t win.”
The whole night wasn’t that depressing though. We did get to make killer smoothies (even the the “sludge glass” that everyone poured leftovers in tasted good), watched 10 Things I Hate About You, stayed up until 4:30 in the morning, and slept in late. And we also managed to find spots for 7 girls to sleep in my living room (if you’ve seen my house you know that’s pretty dang impressive).
I’d forgotten how much fun girly sleepovers can be. Next month is the junior high sleepover. Hopefully, I’ll remember my camera so I can post some fun pics of my girls.

Last night at youth group (yes, I went to youth group on a sick day) we met with our small groups to discuss social justice. We are preparing the kids to do the 30 hr. famine and to go on a mission trip to South Dakota this summer. Anyway, I work the the Jr. High girls and I was really impressed by the discussion we had. One of the girls commented that she felt helpless because she didn’t have any money to buy food or clothes to donate or to sponsor a child. From there they started discussing ways that they could help that didn’t involve money. It was amazing the ideas that they had. This is what they came up with:

Playing “Bigger and Better” with food. Basically, you start with one item, like a piece of bread, and you knock on the first door and say “I have a piece of bread, can you give me food that is bigger or better?” and the person will give you a can of corn or something. Then you take that to the next house and so on and so on. They thought it would be a fun way to collect food for a food pantry.

They want to help clean up in a poor area of town. They want to go to an area, clean up all the trash, wash off graffitti, plant flowers, etc. with the help of the people in the neighborhood.

They are going to start donating some of their own clothes. Everytime they buy something new they are going to get rid of something they haven’t worn in a while.

These are just a few of the ideas they came up with. It was fun to see how excited they became when they realized there were ways they would be able to help.

If anyone has any other ideas that 6th - 8th grade girls could do, let me know.