This week I was able to spend my $25 on two of my volunteers (and one student). One of the volunteers was one of the regulars, and we had lunch and talked about his involvement with the youth group and whether or not he felt pressured to help ever. Great conversation I have been meaning to have with him - I DO NOT want my volunteers to be overwhelmed.


The second volunteer I was able to invest in was a first-timer at Converge Students. Somehow I convinced him to spend 3.5 hours clearing brush, mowing, weed-eating, and performing many other medial, monotonous tasks in an effort to clean up for the NERF WAR - which I'll add was AWESOME!! He did a lot of hard work and was the epitome of an excellent helper. Since we were sweaty, hot, and probably covered in ticks, we just hit the drive-through; though some good conversations about where he is at and how his life is going for him came out of it. I'm really glad that I was able to invest in him after his help with Converge...


Last but not least, I had some really deep conversations with a student this week about why he doesn't put more effort into telling people about Jesus. Not that he does a bad job at it at all, more of a how can I convince him (and how he can convince himself) that God has much bigger plans for him and that a small percentage of his day isn't enough. The coolest thing about it was I asked him why the most important thing in his life only received 10% of his effort, his response was "He's not the most important thing in my life." Honesty is always the best policy. It is always the best way to start the process of healing or fixing or redeeming. At the least, we can always build off of an honest statement. 

I feel like this is a trend. My usual split of $25 dollars to invest in completely different areas of our Student Ministry program. But this trend is a good one, I think, because let's be honest, buying two meals at Red Lobster and calling that a week sounds ridiculous. Anyways, my first investment was last Thursday during a one-on-one with a student. This guy has Thursday nights practically free and is bored often, so I grabbed him after school and we went to Robeks. Naturally, it was $1 smoothie day for regular smoothies! And naturally, his smoothie was $6. Something that had ridiculous amounts of weightlifting powder in it, of course. Anyways, we got to hang out and talk about life... for 35min while we waited in line. Hopefully I'll get to continue the life conversation in the next couple weeks when we get hang out again... I always have a great time hanging out with this guy.



The second half of my $25 was spent on the competitive nature of Converge Students. I bought some materials to facilitate this nature and make sure that it was a little embarrassing too. If you have ever heard of the "banana challenge", you would know that we shoved some potassium into the faces of our students. So here is how it works: you take a whole banana, have a student shove it in their mouth and chew it up, you put panty hose on their head, and then have them blow the banana through the panty hose. The only problem is that they can't blow the banana through the hose, it just gets blown all over their face. One word. AWESOME.

I spent last Wednesday driving 9.5 hours to Louisville, KY for a friend's wedding. Needless to say, the drive was boring. In fact, I took (and not entirely by accident) I-68 to I-79 which was extremely lame with a large redundancy of hills and curves. At times it could have lulled me to sleep.... However, I took the opportunity to listen to an entire series by Andy Stanley entitled "Guardrails".

This was an awesome series, and even though it took three hours and fifty five minutes to listen to all of them,  thoroughly enjoyed it... From alcohol to relationships to friendships to generalities, Guardrails hits home for almost every person. Andy really helped me to relate to a few things that I may be able to regurgitate to my students... Anyways, if you want to check it out, click here.

Over the last two weeks, Converge Students has held two volunteer projects in conjunction with the "Hello... My Name Is... series. The first one was creatively called "Hello My Name is... Volunteer". After attempts at trying to merely get the point across via the use of simple lingo and uncomplicated terminology, we decided to just be overly creative and go with the word "volunteer". Last Friday night, a few of our students volunteered to help set up the movie screen at Ashburn Elementary for family movie night - afterwords, we went and played sand volleyball. Personally, I'm glad we went because there weren't too many people interested in helping.



The second of the two events was entitled "Hello My Name Is... Generosity" - and gained much more student attention that the previously noted project. Undoubtedly because of the impact we though we'd make, we had significantly more students. The project was simple: donate money to buy supplies, package them, drive them to dc, hand them out to the homeless, and change the world one student at a time. We convened on Friday night and spent $465 dollars on supplies, after which we headed off to the Adams' house to pack it up... Saturday morning we headed down to DC and handed all our packages out in approximately 2 minutes! We were completely swarmed by homeless people (we were being safe and cautious, however) when we stepped out of the vehicles. It was so much fun! And a great opportunity to watch the students invest in the lives of homeless people. Since I have a short week this week, our liveon25 was donated to this project to help with food supplies.

Oh, and I am working on a cool movie regarding the trip... Here is a picture of the opening scene... Be sure to check out the website when it is up!! www.j10students.com