I think it's almost two months since I last blogged. Two reasons (both incredibly feeble) - initially I was feeling unmotivated and uninspired but I then found myself in one of the most difficult patches I've so far been through in my time as a youth worker. Obviously it wouldn't be appropriate to go into details, but suffice to say it was an incredible learning curve. But it did mean the time and inclination to blog was lacking.
And now we find ourselves in the festive season. Great. Unfortunately, so far it's only really served to remind me exactly why I'm a youth worker rather than a youth and children's worker! Last week we had a Christmas activity afternoon (kind of mini-holiday club affair) with 52 kids and 6 adults. Yes, I realise all the massive child protection / health and safety issues, and believe me we won't be doing that again! But despite the logistics of keeping that many children occupied for four (yes, four!) hours, it did seem to go pretty well. Activities included making a Roman soldier's helmet, cardboard and cotton wool sheep and angel's wings, all intended as props in a "scratch nativity" which we had to ditch because of the number of children!
Then Sunday morning we had our family Christmas service which, for one year only, was combined with a celebration to mark the 10 year anniversary of the renovation of the church. A quick heads up for anyone planning a "cool" retelling of the Christmas story (or indeed pretty much any Bible story) - check out http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_gospels/jesus_is_born_02/mt01_18plk01_26.html. Somebody with way too much time on their hands has created Lego versions of scenes from the Christmas story which it's possible (probably, in fairness, in breach of copyright) to copy and paste into a PowerPoint presentation. Some of the pictures aren't that helpful, and the creator has used a disappointly old version of the Bible in speech bubbles that I haven't found a way of removing but me and the youth team have so far used the site with kids, young people and aduts and they all think it's the bees knees!
This morning the church hosted the Christmas concert of one of the local primary schools and did an epilogue at the end. I seem to remember from last year that this school does "interesting" productions - wasn't entirely sure how I felt about a group of Key Stage 2 kids singing Madonna's Like a Prayer... While it's good to be invited to be a part of those occasions I'm struggling a bit with the fact that I have four to go to in total this week and there's quite a lot of other stuff I could be doing. Just call me The Grinch!!
Actually, I think my struggle is that over the last week / ten days I've done more stuff with children than I have with young people. Hey ho. I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.
But the great thing is that on Friday night I'm off on a residential (who in their right minds does a residential the weekend before Christmas?!?!) with the oldest cheerleading squad which I'm really, really looking forward to and I'm hoping will make up for some of the frustrations of the last week and the challenges of the last month. Hope I'm not being over-optimistic...
This residential is the one time in the year when this particular group gets to go away without there being any physical cheerleading involved! Although they go away a lot, it's generally to a competition or cheer camp, so this is a great opportunity for some quality bonding time. It's also the designated "spiritual bit", so me, Adam and Meg have been working on some stuff based on the idea of journey, a theme that, fortunately, works on loads and loads of levels.
Last year I found this residential quite tough, for a whole load of reasons, but this year I'm really aware of how things have changed. I don't feel "new" anymore, I have signficant relationships with some of the young people that are going, and I'm hoping that the youth team isn't going to be decimated by illness in the way it was last year!
And it's my birthday while we're away which could be interesting! While I guess there's a sense in which it would be cool to be spending it with friends and family outside work, a large part of me says that surely living in community is all about sharing those signficant moments with the people with whom we live and work. There's a real sense in which I can't think of anyone I'd rather spend my birthday with than these young people. If I'm expecting them, over time, to choose to share their lives with me, surely I should be willing to share signficant personal milestones with them. (And unfortunately it is a signficant milestone birthday!!!)
So that's where I'm up to. Life's good, if challenging. But, quite frankly, it would be dull if it wasn't!!
