Missions Fest

What do you get when you put 30,000 people into one building? Missions Fest Vancouver. We had loads of fun going to tons and tons of seminars (2 actually) and seeing the Watoto African children's choir all of 2oo times (4 actually), flag bearing in the ceremony, talking with a few people, trying to find people from Steinbach (3) and general goofing off. PS, don't give money away to people standing in Tim Horton lineups when they ask money for soup. (Soup means crack.)

Altogether this was a sweet weekend; actually it was Thursday until Saturday night. This meant we were not able to attend youth on Friday. Our alternative service was unassembeling the huge mess of chairs in the sanctuary at church after a women's night. This took about one hour after we were fueled up by the remainder of their dessert. Soooo goooood cake! After we were finished cleaning everything up, they gave us the last 10 pieces of the dessert. Soooo goooood cake!

This week we are heading up the youth night doing all the planning and putting it on. Should be a sweet evening and I'll tell you all about it when it's over!

Joel

(*Editor's note* The internet was down yesterday and thus the blog may not appear on time)

Snowy Snowy Saturday

The best thing thats happened to Kaleo thus far: A week on a mountain. We skied, snowboarded, snowshoed, hot tubbed, and got buried in snow. Our chalet was a three story one, but we thought is was only two, as the first floor was buried in snow. It was an amazing week all together. I tried out snowboarding again and kind of got the hang of it, but eventually switched back to skis at the end of the week. We got back from Mt. Washington at 6:45 on Friday, and by 7:30 we were at New Life checking out the crazy scene before us. The church had been converted into a massive carnival and the youth were running the games. It was really awesome to see them work hard, during the carnival and after, cleaning up the sanctuary. As always, we hung around until 10 doing flips, handstands and breakdancing moves. Next week we are gone to missions fest, and the week after that we (the four guys) are heading up the night. We are thinking of doing a worship/something night, we still have to plan...

Welcome back, I had a sweet Christmas break and I'm eager to get back to business. Last week Friday for youth was the hunger. The hunger like always was sweet. This last Friday was dinner and a movie night. It went alright; we watched Ratatouille which I find hilarious. It was fun having dinner with the kids. I'm still finding it hard to connect with a lot of them. I know I have to push myself more to talk with them and connect with them. I helped out with Sunday school this Sunday and I was able to talk with a few of them about school and their weeks. Hopefully I'm able to do that a lot more during Friday nights. I'm off to hit the slopes! See you next week!