For the past six years, the high school youth group at Gracespring Bible Church has held a small groups retreat in the fall called Ignition. Students are placed in a house with other students from their grade for an entire weekend and are challenged to dive deeper into their relationships with each other and with God. It's one of my all-time favorite youth ministry events. This year's was one of my favorite's. Here's why:
The weekend consists of three large group sessions, four in-home small group Bible studies, a service project, and bowling! At bowling this year I was on a lane with Chris, Brock, and Ashley. All three are seniors in high school and have been coming to small groups and Ignition since they were freshman. Chris and Brock are two of the funniest high schoolers I have ever known. They are always pushing the envelope with their dry and sarcastic senses of humor.
Half way through our first game of bowling, Chris decided that he was going to bowl backwards. So, he began trying to perfect the backwards bowl every time it was his turn. Every time he would get up to bowl, I would pull out my iPhone and record him trying to bowl backwards. I was hoping to catch viral gold for our youth group's Facebook page. All we were getting were gutter balls.
This same process would happen every time Chris' turn came up. He would study his line, grab a bowling ball, begin his backwards throw, and then… gutterball. Over, and over, and over, and over again. Here is a picture of just a few of the videos we had accumulated.
After a while, I began to let Chris bowl on my turn as well. We were determined to accomplish this… gutterball.
Near the end of our second game we were getting discouraged, but Chris was determined. I was called over to another lane by some other students in our small group and on my way back… it happened.
Chris lined up like he always had and threw his bowling ball behind him, but there were two things different about this time. First, I wasn't recording. Second, the bowl was going straight! Chris, Brock, Ashley and I all watched as Chris' ball finally went straight down the lane. It was really straight, oh it's a good throw, it's… NO WAY!! IT'S A STRIKE!!!! I ran up to Chris and picked him up off the ground. We were all going crazy! The one time I wasn't recording it happened.
But that didn't matter. What mattered is that I had given up the comfort of a relaxing weekend in front of the TV to be here with these students that I cared about deeply. Unfortunately, you don't get the enjoyment of watching that video, but I get the enjoyment of having that memory forever engrained in my head. Chris and I will always have that shared memory because we both gave up comfort to spend a weekend diving deeper into our relationships with others and with God. Obviously, the eternal and life changing moments that I also got to experience that weekend were way more important than bowling a backwards strike. But you get the point.
So you're saying, if you don't "get in the game of life," you might miss the backwards strike that may or may not have happened? :). I liked it.
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