The Door Youth Centre is pleased to invite you to join us at New Life Church (Hwy 24 in Collingwood) on Saturday, April 17 at 7pm for a spectacular concert featuring seven former Canadian Idol contestants! Joining us for an acoustic evening are Collingwood's own Drew Wright, Earl Stevenson, Sebastian and Oliver Pigott, Adam Castelli, Omar Lunan, and Paul Clifford.
Tickets are only $20, and can be purchased at Gabriele's Photography or the Financial Centre in Collingwood, or by tracking us down! All proceeds are benefiting The Door Youth Centre here in Collingwood! If you want more info, call John at Gabriele's at 705.445.9030. You can also look up this event on Facebook, just search "Idols Revisited". We hope to see you there for this fantastic evening, and great music!
We arrived safely back home on Saturday night, and I was hoping to post much sooner, but as it would happen, I have been dealing with the after effects of spending March Break with 50 teenagers. I affectionately call this incredibly sore throat "The Outbreak", as many of our staff are feeling similar symptoms. That said, SouthBound 2010 was an incredible trip, and it allowed us many opportunities to connect in significant ways with the youth from Collingwood, and those from around the province.Particularly cool this year was a change of venue for us. After many years of hosting the camp in Melrose, Florida, we opted to go a little further south to Camp Gilead in Polk City. From the moment we got there, many of us were not only impressed with the grounds, but also with the facilities that were available for us to engage in activities with the youth, and many of them built peer relationships over games of carpetball, dodgeball, and Quarto (which is my new favorite game, read about it here). Our campers are set up in teams that are put together at random, and Aaron and I were privileged to lead Team F, or the Fegyptians as we were better known. Throughout the week we participated in the "Rejected Olympics", which involved many bizarre games and team cheers (ours was oddly similar to that of Team E, the Egyptians, but hey, there are only so many songs about walking like Egyptians out there.)(Our names were complete coincidences, for serious).
We purposely include a lot of free time in our schedule, and most afternoons we have open. This is where a lot of the informal conversations with the youth happen, and where relationships really deepen. That, and we don't mind sitting on the beach, even if we are in winter jackets. Each evening we gather in our teams for small group discussion, which leads into our evening sessions. We were joined by our colleague Kevin, who talked about identity and branding, more specifically, what you express to other people. We had amazing discussions about the masks that we wear, the people that we try to be, and the people that we are. We found this to be an important issue for many of our youth, much like it was for us when we were teenagers. Aaron and I found that the conversations that we had with our youth in small group stretched well into the rest of the week. At one point, one of the guys on our team was walking with us and said, "All that stuff about the masks that we wear, I haven't stopped thinking about it all night!".One night we had some time that we previously didn't at the last camp (we were significantly closer to Orlando this time). A few leaders wondered if maybe we should host a hot topics session, where the youth could ask the leaders questions. Over twenty youth showed up, and wondered about where God is in the midst of pain and loss, the Bible, terrorism, love, and many other issues that were important to them. The discussion lasted nearly two hours! For sure, this will become a part of our regular schedule.
Overall, this was an incredible trip, and now, I'll leave you with some pictures.
Human Bowling!
By far, one of the more popular activities, the water tube
The whole crew
Team F
Our gang from Collingwood
It's getting to be that time of year again. We are getting ready for our March Break camp, SouthBound. This week I've been taking stock of my sunscreen and aloe vera, board shorts, and this year, pants, all going into my suitcase for our annual trip to Florida. This is for fairly obvious reasons, one of our favorite trips of the year. We have great experiences with our youth, and I'll be honest, the setting isn't all that bad either. But perhaps a little deeper than the surface is my ulterior motive: to create memories, to share experiences, and to open doors to conversations that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Back story: when Aaron and I were in college, we blew off studying over reading week to join his family in Florida for a family vacation. It was a great week, but with one fairly significant trade off: we were poor students who drove junky cars that would barely make it to the border, so we were left with one choice, Greyhound go anywhere passes for $200. These passes took you anywhere you wanted in North America, but you had to travel an exhausting route. Since then, I have never driven through Alabama on my way to Florida. All in all, we spent nearly 80 hours on the bus, and all of the stops and passengers blended together by the time we reached our 3am destination.
That said, the first year that I took the bus to Florida, Aaron stayed home, and I was having flashbacks. That was also the year that the huge snowstorm hit, and it took us nearly eight hours just to reach the border. However, that time on the bus with 50 youth was amazing! We sang songs, we played baseball up the aisle, we attempted to play cards, and we developed friendships all by the time we reached our camp, more than 30 hours later. It is a great thing to be able to accompany a youth on their first time to Florida (or at least their first time to Florida with us). There is so much to see, from the first gator, to the ocean, to the spectacles of the amusement parks. They are making new friends. They stay up at night talking with their cabins. Our evening program shares the Gospel with them, but not in a bang-you-over-the-head kind of way. Instead, they hear stories, of real life, and of God's presence throughout it. Then our staff listen, and ask questions. It has been amazing seeing kids lives transformed through the community built on this trip.
And in the middle of all of this, we make memories that the youth are still talking about years later. I have kids who come and ask me every year if they can still go, even though they are too old. SouthBound is a weird, wonderful, crazy thing. This week is a busy one, for sure. I am so looking forward to being crammed on a bus with these guys, and seeing our new friendships come out the other side. And that's my ulterior motive.
I must admit, I am one of those people who loves winter (for the most part). Even as I write this, I have just come from a great morning of skiing, where the sun was shining and the snow was good! Part of me doesn't want winter to end, but there is part of me that is anticipating spring. Winter can be hard on our kids at the centre, and it is clear that they are ready for it to end.
This weekend, we seemed to be having a tougher time than usual with our guys. Tensions were high, tempers were flaring, and overall, they were much more aggressive than usual. We wondered if it was a full moon (it was close enough), we wondered if they were getting squirrely from having been cooped up since November (also true), but we knew that there were lots of other things that were going on in their lives that would be contributing to their anger.
We had addressed their particularly aggressive style of pool playing, which has for weeks been resulting in broken cues, bounced pool balls, and even a ball or two being slammed off the table into walls, shins, or the kitchen sink. Most of them told us that they only played like that when they are mad at someone. They were open with us about how they were feeling, which mostly means that they didn't go out of their way to hide it. We talked to a number of guys who told us about anger management, how they'd been kicked out of their programs, broken noses, told their supervisors off, busted a knuckle, or been kicked out of their homes.
Of course, their anger is often the expression of a deeper hurt. Abandonment, fear, pain, sadness, loneliness, and many other things all play into this as well. The dialogues that have been started, no matter how informal they might be, are important ones. The dark, cold, winter is here, but spring is coming! Right now, we are praying for wisdom as we try to find ways for them to have a healthy outlet for their aggression. Please pray for peace. Pray that it replaces the chaos and the anger in their lives. Pray that we are able to have opportunities for real discussion with them. And pray that we can communicate that spring is coming, both figuratively, and in real life. I would be nowhere without the peace of Christ, and I pray that we can share that with them.
The Door Youth Centre is pleased to invite you to join us at New Life Church (Hwy 24 in Collingwood) on Saturday, April 17 at 7pm for a spectacular concert featuring seven former Canadian Idol contestants! Joining us for an acoustic evening are Collingwood's own Drew Wright, Earl Stevenson, Sebastian and Oliver Pigott, Adam Castelli, Omar Lunan, and Paul Clifford.
