Tired But Still Running

Since getting back from England life has been hectic, hectic in a good way. Busy all the time. Never stopping.To be honest, I'm tired, I don't think I have ever been this tired, but it's worth it.

Just days after arriving back to Emerald I met my team up at year ten camp in Bunbaberg for 3 days of intense high ropes, tree climbing and mingling with the youth; getting up in the morning walking out of your room and having the happy face on, before breakfast even starts. I loved year ten camp and seeing the youth on a more personal basis and I'd do it all again, including having the jet lag on top of it all.

Jumping off the 'Flying Possum'

Then we were in Rockhampton for the youth festival that we helped run with the incredible National NET Team. Again another amazing experience where we got to share our lives with youth. We met some incredible youth from around the Diocese and celebrate being young in the church. We really got to hear some incredible stories from the youth that went and it was a blessing to be there. It was crazy, we drove to Rockhampton and organised what was happening only an hour before the youth event started, the event went really well and lives were changed. In all of that craziness we were able to hang out with the National Team before we drove 3 hours back to Emerald to run our young adults group, Awaken. However in the ride back we drove into a massive storm, the storm being that bad that I couldn't see out of the windscreen causing me to pull the car to the side of the road a wait it out for 15 minutes.

The crazy Emerald and National Team

This is the rainbow's after the storm

 Because of the storm hitting us on the drive home we made it back with 25 minutes to spare before Awaken. That night we were all dead and pretty much went straight to sleep after the last person left.

We also had our supervisors up from Brisbane, what an incredible time that was. We so much to do. The first task that they set us was giving us a $2 coin and told to buy something with it, then with that thing we bought we need to trade it with shops and businesses until we had something totally awesome. So off we set with the task in hand. We bought bubbles, and we traded this for some dog food and that for some beer stubbies etc. For 2 hours we did this and it got to the point where people were no longer trading with us but just giving us stuff, so we ended up with so much stuff. We came home with a toy zebra, a picture of 2 dogs, a beer stubbie, bike light, protein shaker and best of all speakers for a iPod (which ended up being very useful). We had lots of ministry stuff to sort out so we spent a lot of time during supe visit working, but we did get the chance to go to Zumba ... funniest thing ever! It's like exercising without feeling like you are. We also gave a 3 minute exhortation to our team, so basically getting the team pumped up and ready to go all out for the last bit of the year. We are told to be really creative so I decided to go with an Avengers theme, I made a little movie out of it ... here it is.

Since supervisor visit, life has been crazy challenging. We have been busy with so much paper work and ministry that we have all been super tired. We sort of got to the point where we were dragging each other through the day and crashing at night after we finished working. Most of our days have been consisting of getting up and starting doing work and ministry stuff from 6:30am and finishing working at like 8:30. I shouldn't complain but I'm tired. It's a good tired though, like after a good work out your muscles hurt, but its a good pain. Like all the organisation of IGNITE, which is the largest Catholic Youth Conference in Australia, we are sorting out taking the youth there. That has been a challenge in itself as all of our plans for it have been falling through and changing every second day and we were exhausting ourselves out with it, but after a lot of prayer, God pulled through and most things are sorted. We have also been doing a HECTIC amount of fundraising and have managed to raise $2500 in two weeks, bake sales, raffles and SO many sausage sizzles (if I see another sausage this year I will cry) IGNITE will be happening in 3 days and we are travelling down to Brisbane on a bus that leaves at 5:30am and will be arriving in Brisbane a 8pm.

For now, I have had some sleep that has helped a lot but I am looking forward to 12 hours on a bus, where you can do nothing but sleep :)