Camping, Church and Chaos

Got back from camping with my son late last night. We had a great time being really lazy. Two highlights:
- We woke up Tuesday morning to discover that our cooler full of water, sodas and food had been stolen during the night. Nothing else from our campsite was touched so our hunch was that teenagers stole it hoping to find beer. Our hunch was confirmed a few hours later when the park rangers returned our cooler to us and mentioned that it happens several times a week and that nothing in our cooler was missing. Apparently kids from the nearby neighborhood walk through the campground, grab a couple of coolers and open them in the bushes looking for beer. Must have been a bummer to open our cooler hoping to find some ice-cold Coors only to find cokes and meatloaf!
- On Wednesday we hiked about a mile to a seal sanctuary which was pretty cool. For the walk home we each had to pick a rock and kick it all the way back to camp.
You know it's a lazy camping trip when the two highlights are solving a stolen cooler mystery and kicking a rock for a mile!

Lots of stuff happening at church right now. We are in a busy season of trying to nail down a move-in date for the Refinery (new student building), as well as wrapping our minds around all the new ministry possibilities that will come our way as a result. A really key player on our junior high team who has been with us off and on for about seven years is moving to Kenya for six months so I am in the initial stages of figuring out what our team and ministry will look like without her. Today, we decided to host a "preparing for junior high" workshop for the parents of our incoming 7th graders. The first half of the workshop will focus on basic developmental changes and parenting tips and the second half will focus on the details of our junior high ministry. As basic as that sounds, I'm actually really excited about it because we've never combined those two topics into a single workshop.

Today I'm finally finishing up the details for the revised Controlled Chaos manuscript. I'm about a month past the deadline so it feels good to be bringing it to a close. The revised version will have three new chapters plus a whole bunch of real life junior high ministry stories from other junior high youth workers. Look for it sometime in late September.