the time has come

So I'm finally home for my teaching practicum and I'm so excited!

Being home also means that I can (finally) start leading at youth group!

So Tuesday night I made the very familiar drive to my home church and prepared myself to jump back into the youth leading game. It was both awesome and a little weird being back. It was awesome because I love youth - especially middle schoolers - and I'm so happy to be back. It was a little weird because all of a sudden these kids who I have known since they were babies are now in middle school going to youth group every week.

The middle school youth group is called Transformers, because it is a place for middle schoolers to go to have their lives transformed by Jesus.

The schedule of the night is a bit different from when I used to help out at Transformers 4 years ago.

Transformers nights in a nutshell: The students come in, mingle and hang out for a while. Then they have a warm up game, we played human tic-tac-toe. After the game there is snack. Following snack we split up into small groups for devo time. We are currently doing Alpha which is super cool because I have always heard of Alpha but I have never done it before. After devo we head back into the gym for big group games - we played life size hungry hungry hippos this week. Finally the night is over and it's time to go home.

If you can't already tell I'm so excited to be back at youth group. Seeing young people on fire for Christ fills my heart and inspires me to draw closer to Him.

Since I have finally started my time at youth group I figure it would be a good idea to make a goal for my time here. My biggest goal for the next few weeks is to get to know the kids. I want to really build strong relationships with the kids at youth group, I want to be someone they can trust and come to if they have any problems or questions. So over the next few weeks I am really going to focus on talking to each of the kids. First I'll start by asking them how their day was or how school is going. I'm going to start small and build up from there.

I can't wait to tell you more next week.

Thanks for reading,
Em