Friday MOVE 2009: LIVE

Friday was all about taking it home.  MOVE has a funny way of creating incredibly memorable experiences for students.  Of course many students also have lasting memories of the way in which commitments made in the heat of the moment, sputter and ultimately wane in the cold winds of life back home.  This year’s MOVE definitely worked overtime to try and prepare us for the journey home.  On the last night each of our students was handed an envelope with a challenge inside of it for them to complete when they got home.  None of our students knew what challenge awaited them until they decided to accept the challenge.   50 unique assignments were handed out, and they were hard.  Students knew was that if they agreed to open theirs they were committing themselves to complete it, no matter what it held.  Curiosity wasn’t a good enough reason to peek inside.  A sort of half-hearted commitment to give it a shot wouldn’t cut it.  Either you knew that God wanted you to do something this year and you were committed to doing it, or you weren’t.  It was serious, it was intense, and it was scary.  Each student was encouraged to leave the envelope unopened if they did not think they were ready.  No shame, no hard feelings.  You didn’t have to accept the challenge to prove you were a Christian, you did it because you were asking God to stretch you, to use you, to make you uncomfortable for the sake of the Gospel.

Several of our students accepted this challenge. Eric and Luke accepted a challenge to serve at a homeless shelter every month over the next year.  Jordan accepted a challenge to adopt a grandparent and spend at least one day a month at a local nursing home visiting the elderly.  Finally, Victoria accepted a challenge to work with someone younger than her as a teacher and mentor.  Some have already began making preparations to engage in their assignment.  At last check all were still committed to making it happen, even if no one else came with them. I’m excited to hear about the ways that God is going to use our students over the next months.

Finally, as a Crossbridge community I encourage you to check in with these young people.  Ask them how its going–hold them accountable.  Of course don’t be surprised if they challenge you to step up to the plate as well.

Last installment of pictures:

So as part of our D-group I asked everyone to build a house out of bubble gum.  What did we learn?  Well, we don’t have any budding engineers among us, but we do have five very headstrong teenagers.

This is what a terrible bubble gum house looks like from above.  (Apparently a bubble gum man has been murdered here.)

The last session got a little rowdy.

Rowdier still.

This is us playing mafia.  I was able to take pictures because I was already dead.  (As per usual.)

7 Days together and we still like each other.  Amazing.

Thursday MOVE 2009: Worship

So confession time…by Thursday I was over it. I was tired, we had some issues that day where some mistakes were made and tempers were lost.  Not to mention that Eric may have had some combination of hypothermia, dehydration, and car-sickness.  Watching him dry heave on the side of a mountainous Tennessee road was not the highlight of the week.  Emotionally I was exhausted, physically I was exhausted, and I was frustrated that I thought some of the progress we had made during the week had been lost over petty stuff.  Then God showed up…

The day’s theme was worship, and the overarching question was what do you worship?  That morning we had made idols out of play-doh, and in what I suspected might be a lame attempt at an object lesson, we brought them to the main session that night.  As we left the session mid-way through to spend some time contemplating our objects of worship we dropped our idols off at the door.  To me (although I never would have told our youth this) it seemed like a lot of work for little payoff.  But then something happened.  As we crossed the threshold back into the chapel, we walked over a sheet of plastic that seemed squishy.  I looked down and watched as the idols we made were trampled under our feet.  I’m not sure why, but this was a cool experience.  Even though Thursday had some bumps, at this moment I felt ready for worship.  Obviously our group did as well…

Looking back Thursday gave me the opportunity to experience two pretty cool aspects of youth ministry.  One was having the opportunity to take students to experience something they often don’t get to see in Tallahassee, and the other was watching as a student responded to the call of God in their life by committing their life to him in baptism.  (One is more significant than the other, but I will let you guess which.)

Number 1.  On Thursday we had some extended free time.  So we packed up and headed to NC to a place known as Elk Falls.  The water was cold, but it was pretty awesome.  Here are some photos of our adventures:

2. Every night the sessions concluded with an invitation to “Move.”  Most of these evenings I would spend time praying for our group, and/or what I felt God was saying to me.  On this night Victoria came over and pulled out her cell phone, which I thought was odd.  I watched as she opened her contacts and began to delete one name after another.  Then she handed me the phone and asked me to keep it for the rest of the week.  I guess idols come in all shapes and sizes, and even sometimes with unlimited texting plans.  We started talking and she told me she wanted to be baptized.  It was kind of cool to see how God took a day that I chalked up as lost and turned it into one of the most memorable nights of our week.  Here are some pictures:

Make sure to talk to Victoria about her decision, and check out some more pictures at our Facebook page: Crossbridge Students.

Wednesday MOVE 2009: Crossing/Calling

Wednesday was another great day.  Wednesday’s theme was Crossing (taken from the account of the Israelites and the Red Sea), and dealt mainly with what God is calling us to.  My favorite aspect of the theme, however, was the fact that MOVE tried to emphasize that a calling isn’t easy.  When we respond to what we believe God is asking us to do it may not be all rainbows and puppy dogs, in fact God maybe stretching us in ways that are altogether uncomfortable.  Listen to what one of our students, Jordan, said about today:

“Thus far this week of CIY has been the most powerful I’ve experienced.  I’ve never felt truly called, but this week has shown me whatever my calling is I can’t do it without God.  Even being called by God and working with God hard times will happen and it may not live up to what you expect.  God has been telling me something.  Whether it is a reassurance or a discouragement I’m not sure, but I have felt something.  Hopefully I’ll be sure of what God is telling me.”

Beyond the theme, one of the main reasons I love MOVE is the way it brings a group together.  The people who go on a trip like this leave changed, and they leave with a special bond that is hard to understand if you’ve never been.  Here are some pictures of us just having fun:

At the end of the night you typically get two hours to talk about the day and just have some fun as a youth group.  On this night we choose to play mafia with Billy Babbino’s group from Panama City.  Good times.  (Dee’s a stone-cold killer.)

The cafeteria was always crowded, so on this night Jordan decided to eat everything with a knife.  His decision was amusing to most, but for some reason it sent Victoria into hysterics.

Thug Life.

For most of the first several days we played Dee’s favorite card game, boot and shoot.  Dee, Jordan, and Luke named themselves Team Domination, which was ironic because Victoria, Eric, and myself (The Combat Wombats) wiped the floor with them everytime we played.  After Wednesday we had to stop playing because I was afraid Dee was going to lose her Christianity.

Here is a picture of me with one of my old friends  youth group Jeff Stalnaker.  Jeff and I grew up together, in fact we spent many years at this week of CIY when we were in high school.  Now Jeff is the youth minister at Post Road in Indianapolis.  It’s cool to see the way people come together at a week like this, and over a decade later the friendships I formed here are still strong.  Who knows maybe a couple of our students will run into each other at a MOVE conference in 10 or 15 years.

More cool pictures like this one are available at our Facebook page: Crossbridge Students.

PS.  These updates are coming in a little later due to some Internet issues while at the site, but I hope you enjoy them nonetheless.

Tuesday MOVE 2009: Freedom

Today all day we talked about freedom, specifically freedom from sin.  Sin has a nasty way of entangling us…of ensnaring us.  One minute we are following God, the next we struggle with an addiction to a behavior that we’d rather shake off but can’t.  All day as we went through this process I thought of the words of Paul in Romans 7:14-20:

“¹⁴We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. ¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.  ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”

Some people try to argue that here Paul speaks of us (and himself) before conversion, but the fact of the matter is this is the life I see so many Christians trying to live.  We desire to do good, but we find ourselves often doing exactly the opposite.  CIY tried to bring this home, to show us how our sin enslaves us.

Listen to what one of our students, Eric, said about today:

“Today we learned about being slaves to sin and how Jesus paid for our freedom. CIY made this extremely and uncomfortably real by having us create paper wrist cuffs that later were tied together creating paper shackles. In an exceptionally spiritually charged atmosphere we tore the shackles off and we strove forward determined to become slaves of God instead of sin.”

We walked around all day with paper-shackles recording the the sins that we struggle with written on the other side.  I love what our students said about this.  “This is depressing.  I’ll be having a good time and then look down and see my wrist, and there sin is.”  That night we spent most of the worship service shackled, until finally we were invited to break free. (Queen reference)  God is a God of freedom.  He brought freedom to the Israelites, and again our story is their story.  God has made a way for us to find freedom from sin (not just forgiveness).  I typically don’t go for these sort of visual metaphors, but the sound of a 1000 sets of shackles being torn apart was incredibly powerful.

Here’s a few bonus pictures because I love you.

As usual you can find more on our facebook page.

MOVE 2009 Monday: Identity

Monday began with traveling.  I won’t bore you with the details, but there was one stop worth mentioning.  Here are some photos of the best gas station I’ve ever been to.  Here you can get some taxidermied animals, some gas (full-service by the way), and your families tombstone.

Who loves bears?  This guy!

Do you need to memorilize your dead, or are you just here for gas?

Now it’s time to move on to the real point of the trip MOVE conference.

This week we are moving through the Exodus, and seeing how their story is our story.  On our first night we talked about identity.  We looked at Moses, a man who was clearly conflicted.  Born to Israelite parents, but raised by Egyptian royalty, eventually self-exiled for murder, and finally toiling away in seeming anonymity as a nomadic shepherd.  But then God called.  In their conversation Moses asked the question that seems so pertinent to us, “Who Am I?”  God’s answer to such a profoundly self-aware realization of Moses inability to define himself, is “I will be with you.”  As Moses tries to turn his encounter with God into an opportunity learn about himself, God invites Moses to come and learn about who he is.  Moses is empowered because he is with God, and Moses–who has chalked his life up to something of a lost cause–discovers that the God of the universe considers him worthwhile enough to invite him to be a part of what he is doing in the world.  The man who never truly fit in with his Hebrew people, now will be leader, and walk alongside the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Moses has founf an identity.

I can’t think of any topic more appropriate for modern day high school students.  I remember what it was like to walk in their shoes.  To desperatley seek the approval of others.  To hope that people identify you as that kid who is funny, or cool, or hot, or popular, or smart, or whatever.  Those markers that cry out an assertion, “I matter! I’m special!” only to follow it with that insecure moment of never really knowing if it’s true.  For many highschool is about identity, trying out different identites until we find one that fits, one that helps find a group of people that accept us, even if we lose ourselves in the process.  The story of Moses and God, our story with God, is really about finding out that our identity is wrapped up with Him.  Ultimately we are who we are because God walks with us, just where we are, just as we are.  God looks at us exactly as we really are, at the deepest and darkest place, and invites us to walk with him.  Suddenly all of the rest our identity markers don’t really matter. No more masks, no moe games, no more prenteding to be someone we’re not hoping that others will approve.  Listen to what one of our students, Luke, said about today: “It helped me realize the worthlessness of earthly identities, and encouraged me to remember the One in whose image I was created.”

What will we remeber from today: Identity= We walk with God.

More pictures from today can be found at our facebook page.

Sunday MOVE 2009

A few shorts words, and a lot of pictures regarding our Sunday adventures on the way to MOVE 2009.

We started out this morning at North Point Community Church.  I promised Yi that I would get Andy Stanley to sign something for me, (Maybe a Bible.  He may not be part of the Trinity, but he is definitely on the JV team) but Andy was not there.  Dee was devastated.  I should have checked with his twitter, but I forgot.  He probably tries to keep a low profile though, I mean it must be hard to be such a rock star.  (Note: Before I get hate mail from Andy’s devotees I am just having some fun with our weird Christian celebrity culture.  Love ya Andy.)

Here’s the stage at North Point, which is impressive.

At some point Victoria found a bear wandering the halls of North Point.  Awesome.

From North Point we ate some lunch and then headed off to the Georgia Aquarium.  It is a little pricey, but very impressive.  I’ll let the photos speak:

Some Beluga Whales.

Here is the largest aquarium in the world.  People just sit in front of it for hours.  (There are four whale sharks in there, which is pretty awesome.)  Apparently they occasionally do slumber parties in the aquarium and you can sleep right in front of this.

The awesomeness left us all in awe.

Of course the day would not be complete without meeting some new people, and making a few new friends.

Dee, Victoria, and Grace made friends with a Ray.

All in all it was a pretty good day.  As usual you can find more pictures at our Facebook page (Crossbridge Students) or follow us at twitter (Crossbridgyouth).

Tomorrow off to Milligan.

MOVE 2009: The journey begins

I (Shawn) am writing this from our hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.  We were on the road for about 6 hours, but the trip was good.  We decided to cram 7 of us together in a mini-van in addition to our luggage for the next week and a half.  I was extremely proud of our students who took seriously my challenge to pack light.  (I honestly couldn’t believe how little some of them brought. In fact I was embarrassed that my bag was the second biggest.  Oh the shame!!!)

Here’s the final result:

All in all the first leg of our trip was good.

Thanks to everyone who gave us a playlist for the trip.  Dan, Jordan sends you a special thank you for “Jump on it.”   Also, Dan I thank you for the CD, but I have to question the arrangement.  Peanut Butter Jelly, then The Killers, then Sugar Hill Gang.  Really Dan? Really?  Alicia and Erica we will get to yours on Monday.

By the by our Road Trip Song is “The Lucky Ones,” by Tim Myers.  Here it is on YouTube if you are interested.

Check out more pictures at our Facebook page.

What is This Blog?

This blog exists to keep the students, parents, and sponsors informed about what is going on in the Crossbridge Youth Group. We’ll post pictures and updates from our youth events and youth trips. At times the blogs will be written by youth sponsors, by students, or perhaps even a few guests we meet along the way.  While this blog is meant to keep people informed about the events of Crossbridge Students, we also hope to share what we are experiencing and learning so that it might be an encouragement to our readers as well.

In addition to the blog you can follow us on twitter where you can find quick updates to what is going on right now in the Crossbridge Youth Group. We also have a facebook group where you can find photos and updates.