Surf and Spirit Weekend!!

I honestly thought that after my best friend Holly left, life would slow down a little and settle back into some semblance of a routine, however, the ball has continued to roll fast. (Which is actually a pretty great thing considering that the holidays are here and I don’t really want to slow down too much to have to miss my family more than necessary.) Anyways, one of my roles on my team here in Portugal is to hang out with the youth of the community as sort of a youth pastor sort person. We have a great group of young people here, and conveniently enough, most of them are girls! So this past weekend, we packed them up, rented a large house and had one massive sleep over. We named it Surf and Spirit, taking the time to hang out with each other, get some professional surf lessons, dance in our pajamas, eat lots of food , watch some chick flicks and go a little deeper with God and with each other. The weekend was a tremendous success and though I barely made it out alive, being completely exhausted, it was totally worth it. As you can see from the pictures, these girls are full of life, keeping my friend Jasmin and me on our toes. Most of the girls seen are a part of the Christian International community here, some of them even being missionary kids. Many of them know the basics about the faith, but what we wanted to do is give the girls some time to go deeper. We wanted to give them space to grow, to pray and to just be with God and be together. One of the nights we took some time to reflect on the story of Hagar. Hagar is an interesting gal in the Bible who through a series of twists in the story ends up in the dessert alone a couple of times running from home. As we read the story, we realized that God came to find her and bring her back to where she needed to be. Hagar responds to God in a unique way: she gives God a name. She calls him: “the God who sees me.” The story really ministered to me as it lets me know that even when I feel alone and completely invisible, God still sees me, e still cares, and He still loves me. God comes for us. It was cool to watch how the girls processed this, seeing that God cares for them in the same way. As a youth being raised by American parents and yet in a completely different culture, one can feel pretty alone at times, but God still sees them. He still finds them where they are and meets them. Though these girls know the stories, the facts and the Bible pretty well, our hope was to lead them deeper to a place where they absolutely know that they are loved by God. I think the Spirit was at work in our midst! Another cool thing that happened beyond the surfing and the chick flicks, was that each of the girls received a verse on Friday and another verse on Saturday, both chosen at random by Jasmin and me. It was amazing to see how God used the verses to speak to each of the girls something different and yet something they felt they needed to hear. Overall the weekend was a huge success. Sure it left us tired, dirty and even a little salty, but I could see on the girls faces a renewed hope and excitement about how is working God in their lives.