Monster Worship and Other Happenings

Yesterday at church, we spent the entire afternoon completely renovating our youth trailer.

We built a partitioned-off prayer room on one wall of our trailer that holds a small sofa, recliner, and endtable for the sole purpose of coming to God and resting in Him. There's a cross on the wall in the prayer room that we can nail prayer requests to until they're answered. At that point, we rip the paper off, leaving the nail, and place the prayer request in the Book of Answered Prayer, which is a small scrapbook on the endtable. There's also a small fountain and some relaxing music in the room for a calming "ambience."

Some people worked on a large cross to be placed in the very front-center of our praise band stage. They distressed the wood with hammers and stained it with shoe polish. We later draped a purple cloth over it, and it looks really cool. It's a great way to focus our attention on why we're there: to worship God.

We moved all of the games to the other end of the trailer and partitioned off our meeting area with dividers and made an entrance out of two pillars. The meeting area is no longer set up in rows, but in a cafe style with small tables.

Some people worked to build two large storage cabinets for all of the miscellaneous junk our youth group's accumulated.

Finally, we placed an altar and "washing basin" near the entrance to the prayer room and meeting / worship area. The altar is a desk with gold and purple cloths draped over it, an offering bowl for our missionaries, candles, and a cross on it. For the "washing basin," we covered an old podium with burlap and cut a slot in it big enough to slide papers through it. We are supposed to write down problems in our lives or things we need to confess, and then place them through the slot. Beneath the slot, completely unable to be seen, is a paper shredder that shreds whatever you're getting rid of. It's very symbolic of what Christ can do in our lives.

Needless to say, the trailer is completely different now with a more God-focused worship area. It was a long, tiring day, but the people were really fun to be around and it felt great to get something that big accomplished in one day.
***

Today, school went well for a Monday. There wasn't too much arduous or tidious work. I found out I did well on my exam in psychology, so I'm not worried at all about the actual AP test because I only need a 3 for college credit, and my exam grade was a 5. Biology has been endless review for the past two weeks, but it is helping me remember some long-suppressed information. I didn't think I'd have an exam in my independent study, but the teacher finally stopped putting it off and said that we're starting it tomorrow. I'm sure it will be curved, so I don't think it will affect my grade at all. In English we've got to finish revising our papers that were due today and then we just have one more paper and the exam until we're done. Physics is truly a joke because we can get as much help as we need on the test if we ask the right questions. The only class I don't really care for is Spanish 3. That's not because I don't like the language; because I do. It's just that the teacher is way too serious and I can't joke around, be sarcastic, or do a lot of the stuff that I could do last year in Spanish. We're studying Hispanic artists right now and they all have really messed up lives. I'd like to get back to learning the actual language, but I don't think we will any more this year. I hope to keep studying Spanish in college until I'm fluent; I just hope that my teacher doesn't turn me off completely to Spanish.

Small groups went well tonight. I enjoy being with all of those guys and just sharing life and talking about God. I'm glad that we're able to have deep conversations, yet still joke around.

Well, I've been typing for far too long, so I've gotta go.

Hasta luego.