Sorry so late!

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6TH

Ok I don't remember much about this day... it was a little bit ago and so many things have happened since that it's long form fresh in my mind.. that's what I was afraid of; but there's nothing I can do now. I will do my best to get the main gist of it down.
We had church on Sunday of course. It was really different. We get there and David (one of our favorite islanders) opens up with some scripture and then we sing a song. After that we all crowd into a small side room with some of the youth kids for their morning sunday school church. It was very different, and we all almost automatically saw things that needed to change. Not that we were just going to step in and demand that they change... only that we saw the issues at hand. It was interesting for most of us. Following Sunday school was the actual church service. Worship was honestly really long, again, some changes needed to be made... but P. Jimmy brought a good word :) It was my first oppurtunity to see him as a pastor, doing his job pretty much. Every other time I've been around him it's always been having fun out on the cays or something. We had communion (i don't know spelling for that), and then lunch at P. Jimmy's. Honestly, P. Jimmy should be banned from having food at his house. Seriously, it's just all so so good! And they had so many amazing cookies and little cheese cakes and stuff, man, to-die-for. No joke. There were a lot of bees tho.. mostly just this one, but I just can't handle those warrior wasps so I ate inside. Sigh... I will conquer this fear by the end of the trip, I promise.
Oh we met some of the kids, that was pretty cool... I met this girl Nicole and as soon as I saw her God spoke to me to remember her name... ever since she was really heavy on my heart.
I really don't remember every detail anymore, but I think after that a lot of ppl spent time on laptops and then I did all the guys laundry, folded it and stuff.

Later we all went to the beach together. It was super fun, I ran ahead, I felt like running and I wanted to explore at the same time. So I ran ahead... I got to the corner of the rock and the shore and there was a shark! No joke! And it was huge! I mean not a great white or anything... but it was longer than I am tall. Well it was only a few feet away from me when I saw it and I was pretty much in the water... I mean it wasn't a huge deal but it nearly gave me a heart attack. It just turned around and slowly started to swim away. I ran back and then Ian and Dionis ran to me and I shared in all my excitement about the shark. We walked up the edge of the rockface together and finally spotted it swimming within the shoals. Once the rest of everyone caught up to us we just hung out and climbed the rocks for maybe forty five minutes to an hour. We were out there for about an hour and a half if I remember. It was super fun though. I love it on those rocks, it's gorgeous and watching the waves can be mezmorizing.

I stayed behind a little bit as everyone else started to walk back cause I needed to talk to God about a few things... One of them being the need for me to refocus my heart for the trip.. I really needed a reminder of why I was there... well, we get back from the beach and Dionis runs in to P. Jimmy's house, when he came out he said that Kirk needed me. I went and got cleaned up and then headed over to P. Jimmy's house. Getting there Kirk threw at me that he wanted a touch card (a card with info and media about a youth group etc.). He wanted it that night, for the next day. We talked about it a little bit and then P. Jimmy's son came out, apparantly he was assigned to help me with this project. He had been asked to come up with a good name for their youth group. P. Jimmy's son's name was Blake and he was just a young teenage boy. After having the oppurtunity to spend some time with him though, he ended up being one of the coolest guys. Kirk and I talked to him a little bit about the card and then I asked if I could be free to ask a few questions. I wanted to make him think a little bit about stuff to kind of get him more excited about helping us with this. I also wanted to get a better idea of where he was with God. I asked him what God meant to him and what He looked like in his youth group, what he wanted Him to look like. This whole time Blake has one of those, "yea yea let's get this over with, this is weird" attitudes about him. I am not swayed. Kirk and I discussed with him about how sometimes we like to think of God as a thing and not a personal God, which he is most definitely the latter. God is so much more than a personal God, He designed us specifically for relationship with Him. Anyway we also asked him if he could hear God, he said not really... then we asked him if he could talk at the age of 1... he didn't think so.. we asked him why... well he was still growing, developing... so why can't he hear God? Well he's still growing and developing in his relationship with God. It was pretty cool, he didn't soak it all in right away but he's one of those kids who's listening even when you don't think he is.

After that, Kirk sent the two of us to work. So we went off and started to hack at what we wanted to do as a touch card design. Oh I should probably explain that we came up with the name "project-x" for the group, for these three months that we're here at least. So, after some prayer, we really dove into the project. I kept questioning him to keep him thinking and make this his project... since we were talking about growth I asked him what best represented growth... he said plant or tree. So I started to break down with him the different trees that are in the

Bahamas (I wanted it to be form their country) and how different aspects of that tree represent our relationship with God. We found out that they have evergreen trees down there and actually stuck with that one because Blake felt it fit the best. Evergreens stay green, they never fade, their roots go deep... they have many branches and sometimes they can get overgrown (the bushy ones are the ones that they have)... so they have to get trimmed back. All excellent comparisons to our growth in the Lord. Once we had the tree down I asked him if thats all he wanted to do, draw a tree and then write project-x? Then he came up with the idea of making a timeline of growth. At this point I could see that Blake was getting much more into what we were doing, and getting a little bit excited!