Ireland Update 5

Day 13 - Monday, June 10
Before Kids Club that day, I took some really great time to just reflect and pray through some things, including praying for all of the kids who have been a part of my team so far. We've had something like 20 kids who have come in the P3-4 grade range at least once, but usually only 10-12 on any given day. They were just heavy on my heart that day.

Kids Club went fairly well. For craft time, the kids made wordless bracelets to go along with our super power of the day (forgiveness) and our salvation theme. I explained the meanings of the colors before they made them, and then our Bible story during lesson time was about the crucifixion of Jesus - which Jonathan did a great job on. He had a couple of the kids kind of act it out, which held everyone's attention pretty well!

Later that night, one of the other team members said that one of the girls from my group (who has been in the habit of causing disruptions) was actually wearing her bracelet to Sports Camp, and the girl was able to go through and explain almost all of the colors to the leader! So that was really encouraging for me to hear :)

Monday was our day without Wally, because he was at a friend's wedding. We were all a little worried about how Sports Camp would go without him there, but it seemed to go pretty well! I didn't play any sports really because of my ankle, just tossed a Frisbee around with a circle of kids part of the time. So it didn't feel as fun for me, but it did mean I got to chat with a couple of girls a bit more, which was good.

Day 14 - Tuesday, June 11
In the morning we went to a mall in a larger town that's a bit further away - primarily so that some of our team could get hoodies for printing a team hoodie. It was interesting to walk around an Irish mall. In many ways it was pretty similar to an American mall, but at the same time it definitely felt different. They had the Irish equivalents of a Dollar Tree and a WalMart as part of the mall, which was rather odd. There was also a grocery store in the mall. So in some ways it was more like what we would think of as shopping center - but the building design was like a mall.

Kids Club yesterday focused on love, from the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. I had the kids in my team act out the story, which in some ways helped them concentrate on it better and in other ways was more of a distraction - but I think they got the point. They were definitely on the rowdy side in general though - probably because Tuesday was our first truly Irish day: RAINY and definitely chillier. The amazing thing was that our whole group was almost completely silent for about 30 seconds when I reviewed a bit about yesterday's lesson, and talked about how Jesus' death for us is the best love story ever. That was definitely a God thing, because that group of kids is *never* without someone talking or distracting the others. So I was thankful for that :)

Yesterday evening we had the game night for the elementary-aged kids. Because of the colder and wetter weather, we decided to do it inside the church....which was certainly a challenge. I was playing with the younger kids, and it was hard to keep them all involved in the games for a whole hour and a half.....but we made it through!

Day 15 - Wednesday, June 12
Today was mostly warmer than yesterday, though in the evening it was on the misty/rainy side again. And right now, at midnight my time, sitting at the picnic table on our host's porch (nicknamed our "Internet cafe") I am definitely chilly and can see my breath!

We had another assembly this morning with the school that we met with last Wednesday. Since we only had three more days of Kids Club left, we didn't want to do a big invite to Kids Club push. So we didn't use our super hero alter egos at the assembly. Instead, we led songs and then the team members who hadn't participated much in the assembly last week did a skit about not listening to temptations in life. If you've seen the phenomenal skit by Hillsong of the temptations distracting the girl from following Jesus, our team's skit was a much simplified version of that.

It went well, and was fun as always to see some of our Kids Club kids at the school. Afterward the older kids invited us to a little reception with biscuits (cookies) and juice. We also got to watch them have a bit of their Spanish class, which I think our two native Spanish speakers enjoyed.

Kids Club today was on the crazy side. We were talking about peace today.....and Jonathan's and my class did not provide a good example of peace............on the contrary, it was pretty off the wall :/  The upside was that during craft time Jonathan and I took a picture with each of our kiddos, that we're planning to print off and give them. They turned out pretty cute, so I'm excited to have those :) The kids did not do a great job of paying attention during either lesson or Bible verse...but somehow one of our gals managed to fall sound asleep really suddenly and she stayed sound asleep despite all the other kids messing with her trying to wake her up! It was rather weird....

In some ways I am super ready to be done with Kids Club in two days. As Jonathan said this evening, the kids are just getting crazier in some ways because they know us now and are just being themselves. But at the same time I will miss all the kids in my group (though some more than others....) The fun thing will be that on Sunday all the kids are invited to a celebration evening/dinner thing that one of the churches is putting on. So I hope a bunch of the kids and their families will come to that. But we'll see!

After Kids Club, we rushed back to our cottages, rushed through dinner, and went straight back to Killyleagh to get our team fellas to the guys' night on time. Our girls' night went pretty well - and it was much more meaningful for me than the one last week. We played "Just Dance" a couple of times while we waited for gals to trickle in, then we sat down and played a question game. Everyone had a chance to write down questions anonymously on a sheet of paper. They could either make it a general question for anyone, a question specifically for the JBU gals, one for just the Killyleagh girls, or one addressed to an individual person.

Some of the questions were silly, and some (several) were intended to be embarrassing, and others were more intentional to create an environment for good sharing. I got one of the embarrassing questions addressed straight to me, but I had kind of been expecting it and the way it worked out I was able to think about my answer ahead of time. So I hope I was able to turn my answer into something which will make the girls reflect on things...even though I'm not sure they were really listening to the important part of my answer.

The best news is that a couple of the other leaders were able to be very intentional about how they answered questions to point these gals (ages 11-13) toward having a relationship with Christ. Five of the dozen or so girls there showed interest in learning more about Christianity, and asked for Bibles - so we gave them some that we had. Please be praying that these precious young ladies would really keep thinking about what we discussed, and that they would be able to plug into good influences and not just the "easy" influences around town, which would tend to be negative.

Up Next
Tomorrow we're going to a field day that the elementary-aged kids will have. We don't have to do anything for it (that I know of), we're just going to watch and cheer! We have two last days of Kids Club, and two last youth Sports Camps. Then we'll be going to Belfast on Saturday, and Sunday will wrap up our ministry time in Killyleagh with Dr. Balzer preaching at church and the celebration dinner. The rest of our time in Ireland (about a week), we'll be getting some much-needed R&R/touring. So please keep praying for our final interactions with the kids and youth of Killyleagh, and that Wally and those who work with him will be able to continue watering the seeds we have hopefully planted!