Ministry & Youth: PYV Summer Camp 2019

December 29 2019.

Sunday.

Today has been a day set apart for worship, the study of God’s word, and fellowship. We began with the leaders meeting and then into breakfast. Most people had breakfast today, but there’s always one or two who prefer to sleep in rather than eat. We all make our own choices.

The study groups today spent time considering the wedding at Cana and the implications for each of us. It has been good for the groups to look at a passage of Scripture like this (John 2:1-11) and recognise the generosity of Jesus at this wedding celebration, as well as the role of the servants in this story. When we link this to Isaiah 25:6-9 and the future promise of these verses, the story of the wedding is very relevant to us.

Our morning worship session today didn’t have any special guests which meant we could spend more time in singing and in listening to Andy’s preaching. Once again, it was worth listening to. We opened our Bibles to John 1 where those magnificent phrases that describe ‘the Word’ are written. Andy highlighted that the Word

Was with God
Was God
Was there in the beginning
Made everything
Is the source of all life.

Not only that, the Word is personal – “The word became flesh and made his dwelling amongst us”

God’s will for us is that we should know Jesus.

Our time in the afternoon was taken up with five workshops. Campers had the option of choosing one of the five to attend. As ever, it’s interesting to see which workshops will be the most popular and today it was the workshop about Quiet Times with Andrew and Suzy Vines that drew the biggest crowd. Louise Goswell and I conducted a workshop on ‘friendship in the digital age’ covering things like social media use, sexting, and cyber bullying. We will repeat these again tomorrow, so I hope to be able to write something about the other topics then.

Free time gave people the opportunity to sit in the comfort of an air-conditioned dining room and play board games, or to play other games inside the stadium. I don’t know if any were bold (silly) enough to play outside as it was very hot here today. Others spent time praying together in our daily prayer meeting.

The evening session was a whole lot of fun. First, campers had the opportunity to catch aliens and rabbits. Clearly some of the aliens weren’t very good at hiding as they were found quickly, although one of them did take quite a while to get captured. He was better at evading the crowds. Once they were all found, we divided into two larger groups for the inevitable game of Capture the Flag. The sun had gone behind the hills and a cooler breeze was beginning to blow while we were doing this. It was wonderful.

Victory

Some youth take this game very seriously. This is evident in the care they take with forming a strategy, but it is most clear as they run full pelt down a hill to get to the flag, while others run at them to stop them. It was good to watch – and watching is all I want to do.

The Late Show tonight included the showing of videos that were made last night. It’s a while since we have done something like this at a Summer Camp, and I think video editing software has greatly improved since then. These short videos were absolutely outstanding. We probably won’t be able to put them on YouTube for copyright reasons, so trust me that they were great.

And I finally got to the couch for an interview. But just as we were about to start our convener came up to tell Shady that we were running late and needed to finish now.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow night.

Monday is expected to be a very hot day. We’ll do all that we can to keep everyone safe, including swapping our planned activities for Tuesday when it’s cooler.

Thanks for reading all this.

Brian.