A Stone's Throw

We are heading off to Youth Camp at Baptist Hill Assembly outside of Mt. Vernon, MO.  I will be the camp pastor for the Greene County Baptist Association’s Youth Camp and Jenny and the boys are going to be hanging out with a bunch of teenagers.  Back to my roots!!  My friend, Kurt Simon, invited me to preach for them this week.  I am actually kind of nervous!  I haven’t been around a large group of teenagers in quite a while–and I am pretty scared of them to tell you the truth–just kidding.  I always have a nervous stomach before these kinds of events because I know the potential that is just waiting to be realized.

I can remember youth camp at Centrifuge in Glorieta, NM when I was going to be a Freshman in High School.  I can remember making a decision at that camp that I wanted to be around these kinds of environments for the rest of my life!  Maybe it was the shorts and t-shirts, but I think it was the Lord calling me to ministry!

Be praying that God really moves in the hearts of these students and leaders this week!

We must be a real glutton for punishment as we ventured out to give the beach the old college try once more, but this time right across the street from the condo. Tucker didn’t get a good night’s rest, so he was teetering on the edge of meltdown. He was a little confused at where he was at last night and didn’t really get to sleep at all. Basically it was not going to happen . . . so Tucker had to go back to the condo and take a long nap. Taylor and I went to the pool later on.

Here is Taylor’s Travelogue . . .

The next day day we went back to the beach in front of our condo. We were only there like 20 minutes. Then we went to the pool by our room. My dad and me raced. I won every time!

No pictures of this crazy day

We decided to give the beach another try and headed out to the St. Andrews State Park (which is really awesome, by the way) to get some beach time. The boys didn’t think the “our” beach was clean enough, especially after going to the Shell Island beach the other day, so we were going to try to go to a cleaner beach. I find it funny that Taylor says “that is the cleanest/dirtiest beach I have ever seen.” Oh yeah, how many beaches have you seen buddy?

We had made our lunch, packed the chairs (thanks Gary and Fran) and a canopy shelter (thanks mom and dad). I realize that the picture on the front of the canopy is a beach scene, but they definitely didn’t have the beach scene we have had the entire time here–pretty brisk wind. So basically our canopy deal didn’t work because it was too flimsy for the large winds on the beach.

Secondly, what is always at the beach and tends to multiply?? Everybody? SAND! When God promised Abram that he would make his children as many as the grains of sand on the seashore, he wasn’t messing around!! I think the boys like the idea of the beach and the sand, but they get sand on their hands, then head to their faces to scratch an itch or whatever and the get sand in their eyes. Then add an anger management issues and throwing sand at each other and you have a disaster on your hands. That is what we had on our anniversary morning and early afternoon–a full on beach disappointment.

We left the beach just in time to head to Happy Hour at Sonic (wish is was something else, quite frankly–just kidding). It is “anti-customer service week at the beac”h for us, so even something as simple as some drinks turns into an almost 45 minute ordeal. The first hint was that the girl came over the speaker and said there was a 15 minute wait, would we still want to order. Well, we had just gotten done with an absolute beating with a two year old, so we needed some self-medication for sure. We ordered our drinks and watched all of the cars on our side come and go. . . 25 minutes go by and Jenny walks up to the door. She is not alone. There is a pretty upset senior adult who wants names and telephone numbers of district managers. The beauty of the deal was that the manager and assistant manager are both sitting down eating while the short staff is drowning. They didn’t even come out to face the angered public, they sent this poor teenage boy out to try to calm down the masses. Forty-five minutes and free drinks later, we were off to take a nap at the condo.

We had some really good hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner and ventured out to get those awesome vacation pictures next to the sea oats and the sunsets. Did I mention that Tucker doesn’t really like the sand and waves? I think I did.

Overall, we had a really good time and we think we got some good pictures to capture the memories of this week. We had to go to the pool before bed and really had a good time at the pool.

Here is Taylor’s entry for the day . . .

We went to the ocean. It was a lot of fun. Then we went to the pool.

Here are a few of the pics from that photo shoot . . .