Summer Fun.

We just took abunch of middle school students to the west coast of Florida for a mini-retreat. A week ago we had like 11 students signed and paid, causing for some frustration. We sent out postcards, left MySpace comments, made phone calls and announced the activity every time we could. Well, after the weekend we had a major influx of interest and ended up bring a total of 32. We left on Wednesday around noon (after picking up about 15 students in our Calvary Cruiser). We got to Bradenton a few hours later where a church hosted us for the evening. We brought our worship band (and sound equipment). Set everything up, hung out with a bunch of the kids from the hosting church and they showed us their student building (it was pretty cool!) We then had an incredible dinner prepared by some of the women of the host church, played a little more and had a worship service type deal. God moved in the hearts of some of our students and we ended up praying and counseling many of them the night through. We got up early had some homemade pancakes (yum!) then hopped in the bus and headed 45 miles north to Tampa to spend the day at Busch Gardens. It was a great time and really believe that the Lord did a cool thing in our ministry. A lot of the students that we are ministering to are high risk and have never really done the church thing before. It's an honor to be able to serve and love these students and I pray the Lord continues to reveal Himself to our students and that they would be used to do incredible things for Eternity.