Just Because my Name Means "Grace"

Well, this past week was youth camp! Our church has always done their own youth camp and it has been ran and administrated by the same people for about 10 years now, but this was the first year they handed it over… and who you you think they handed it over to??? You probably guessed it! US! Not just me and Seth, but Bobby and Erin, who are the you ministers at the main branch. Basically Bobby and Seth planned the entire week and me and Erin were there to make sure all of the thousands of details fell into place.

This camp was different than any camp I’ve been apart of. After touring with Wild Week, doing you camp on a normal “camp ground” with less than a thousand students took a little while to wrap my mind around, but I did and I was so excited about it. Kids camp was Sunday afternoon through Tuesday morning and youth camp was Tuesday morning through Friday. With both branches combined we had about 140 youth at the camp! I got there on Tuesday and was so excited! Any opportunity to get to know our kids better totally pumps me up. We’ve been running around 70 (on average) students and it’s so hard to connect with them all at the weekly youth service. Well, Tuesday was registration and if you’ve done youth camp before you know that camp week is the perfect excuse to stay up all night with the camp staff and laugh until you cry… well, we did. We had SUCH an amazing administrative group, Between Seth and I, Bobby and Erin, our emcee Jared and Media Tech Bobby Pease, there was never a dull moment. A total of 11 videos were made during the week which were all basically products of late night conversations full of laughter and sarcasm.

Seth and Bobby Mooney were the camp speakers and let me just say WOW! Seth just blows me away anytime he speaks, but this week every service he brought tears to my eyes. I’ve traveled the nation many years of my life with the best of the best youth communicators and I would put Seth up against any of them. It’s like speaking and communicating to youth is what he was created to do and when he is up talking to them it’s like God is just smiling on him. It was incredible to see and made me SO proud. I have got to be the luckiest woman alive! I don’t want to leave Bobby out either, he spoke as well and did a fantastic job. I’m sure Erin will blog and elaborate on his awesome gift as well! =) We did what we came there to do and that was to minister to students, do our best and then watch God transform their lives… mission accomplished!

So here’s the bad news… most everyone knows that on Easter Sunday I sprained my left ankle very badly and just recently got out of an air cast and had just started to work on building my strength in that ankle back up. Well, on the second morning of youth camp, I was walking into the chapel, stepped off of a 3 inch high ramp and completely ripped up my right ankle. It looks as if something is torn. The pain was EXCRUCIATING and I don’t know if I shed more tears out of frustration or because I was genuinely in that much pain. I am going to the Dr. tomorrow. Despite my pain, I stayed at camp and crutched around for the final 2 days. It is a lot worse than the other one was. It is very purple and very blue, I have been in constant pain since Wednesday, and it is about 4 times it’s normal size. I am walking, but with the assistance of crutches or my precious husband who has big, sexy muscles that I greatly appreciate. I am SO mad/upset about it still and can’t believe that this happened this soon after I hurt the other one. I will have a better report after tomorrow. I will be posting more pictures soon.

Toughing it out...