"Fun Stuff"

One of the goals of the youth staff is to find ways to allow our kids to be kids. Most of them live such rough lives that by the age of 6 or 7, childhood is over. From then on it is all about survival and "street cred". Our goal is to create a safe environment where they can relax and forget about the outside world, if only for a few hours.I feel like we achieved that last night. We took 9 of our best behaved Rock Island kids to the Arts festival. For 2 1/2 hours our kids got to leave their 'hood and spend time eating funnel cakes and rolling down massive grass hills.

We left around 5:00 and got there just before the rush. Each kid was allowed to pick out one food item for dinner. After we all got our food we sat down in the grass and had one great big picnic. We had indian tacos, fried pickles, sweet potato fries, fish tacos, and much more. At one point during our picnic I looked around and every single kid was laughing. That may seem normal to those of you who have kids, but laughing is not as frequent in our ministry as it should be. We're hoping to change that.

After our picnic we started walking around and the kids decided that the huge grass hills looked alot more appealing than the art booths, so we stopped and the kids spent a good amount of time wrestling Ron and Luke in the grass and rolling down the hill as fast as possible. More laughter!

We ended the night sitting in the grass again sharing a few desserts like dippin dots, cinnamon rolls and funnel cakes. It was a really good night!

As I was driving home I made a decision that Ron, Luke and I need to spend more time letting the kids do the "fun stuff". I thought I would leave that open to interpretation for anyone who reads this. If you have an idea for "fun stuff" or you would like to be a part of it, shoot me an email and let me know. It may be that you heard the circus is coming to town and you want to let us know about it or you have 4 extra tickets to a Redhawks game and want to throw them our way. Maybe you want to offer to take one of the kids to McDonalds once a month. I'm passing the torch to the blogging community on this and giving you an opportunity to be involved. I believe some of our best ministry time might just come out of the "fun stuff".