Youth Explosion

That's the name of our church's back to school bbq that we had yesterday...and it was just that. It was mostly geared toward the younger kids and was a blast. We took about 14 kids(mostly about Brian's age) from our neighborhood and a couple of their parents as well :) The church was pretty packed and the kids had fun switching between scarfing down food, playing wii, and sliding on the blow up waterslide. If you can't quite picture that...think about combining a slip 'n slide and one of those bounce house things...along with a little pool of water that you slide into at the end. Not too many injuries...a few when the kids decided that it was a good idea to run back up the slide part...but no broken bones. We solved that when we made it a race to slide down and run back to the line...which also had the added benefit of tiring the kids out.

The party ended about 2, but a number of the kids came back to our place for the rest of the day, thankfully the nice lady running the food at the church had given us some of the leftover burgers and dogs...so there was no cooking to do come dinnertime. My pastor and I were talking about it and it really has been a blessing the number of kids who come over to our house and want to do stuff with us. Yet, it is overwhelming at times and definitely wears us out trying to keep up with them. When they aren't in school, I don't think we go 1/2 and hour without having someone knock on our door, either asking to come over and play or for me to help the fix up their ever failing bikes.

However, it was very encouraging that two of them wanted to, and did, come to church with us this morning. They seemed to have enjoyed themselves and wanted to come again. The kids are in some ways so innocent and in other ways you can see how some hard aspects of their lives are beginning to come through. These will only get worse as they grow older. There is some gang activity around, and it is especially prevalent at the schools, many come from broken homes, and one of the saddest statistics is that our area has the hightest teen pregnancy in all of South Carolina. Please pray for this kids, and especially as we try to get more involved with some of the older kids as well.