Ski retreat '08

After a very busy January and February, I think I'm back to having a little space to do some more blogging about things I'm thinking about related to youth ministry and my own life.

President's weekend was our annual high school ski retreat where we head out to Columbia's retreat center and have an opportunity to get away from the distractions to worship together and have some fun together. This year we had Tom Lynch come and share about God's story and how we fit into it, focusing on taking risks for the kingdom. This is a topic we've been talking through in our high school ministry since January. My hope here is that we can teach our youth what God's story is, and how their story connects with God's story. Part of the weekend is of course writing more stories about our community including the fun we had with a day of skiing /boarding on Saturday, and snow tubing on Sunday. Most of our youth have been posting pics on facebook, and they're great to see all the interactions they continue to have with each other. We've also had some of our youth ask to do a retreat every weekend. Oh to be in a time of life where that could happen :).

On a totally geeky side of things, I'm starting to get back into playing with Linux. There is a new (to me) distribution called Ubuntu which in african means 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. Its been a couple of years since I've had a chance to do any work with Linux, but I'm looking forward to playing around with this distribution to see if it could actually be a windows replacement as many folks out there are saying. Interestingly, there's a theological connection here as we talk about youth ministry. We are who we are because of who Jesus is, yet he has put each of us together in community for a purpose, and each of our youth ministries has a unique identity.