Crazy Week

So, it's crazy to think that I've already been in Colorado for a week now but i have and its so far been amazing. I've done all kinds of sweet stuff. Swimming, basketball, buffalo wild wings, Chipotle, hilarious moments of laughter. The coolest part is that it's all involved youth. The kids that I have in the youth group that I'm working with this summer are all awesome. It's been a blast hanging out with them all and getting to know them. Hanging with young people allows me to be a kid and really not have a whole lot of worries when I'm with them. It's like super legit!

This week has been crazy in the sense that I feel that it's been going by really fast. It started with a nice 4:50am wake-up call to go pray at H.O.P.E. which is the prayer house here in Englewood. I don't care what it's for, waking up that early in the day is not fun at all but meeting with the Lord is worth it. I was telling Jody, one of the other interns here at Englewood Assembly this morning that a few months before I came out here to CO that I started to wake up like 5 or 6 in the morning to run and get some devotional time in before class and I thought that it would be something I could keep going for the summer. Well, so far, not so good. I hate mornings with a passion and despite my honest intentions, I haven't been doing good with the workout/devo early morning time. Today was a semi-start as I got up at about 5:45 to go to a small group bible study that Jody is apart of and that was pretty awesome, so maybe I can get my early morning deal going again. A guy can dream, right?

So many cool things have happened since Monday. The lead team from EA met with some other churches in the community and Randy Penn who is the head of the Englewood Chamber of Commerce to talk about how the churches could collectively reach the city of Englewood. That was pretty cool to be apart of. All the churches in this city have the heart to be apart of the community and to be outward focused which is really amazing to me. Love it! I also got to hang out with two of the guys from youth at Buffalo Wild Wings Tuesday to watch the Lakers-Celtics game. We had a great time since the Lakers won and we pounded 50 wings! My stomach was pretty pleased about that. haha.

Last night was the first youth service of the summer and the first service that I was in charge of. It was fun to get to hang with everyone together. I did my message on Potential and I think that the kids were impacted by it which was encouraging. After church we had a crazy basketball game with some of the staff at EA taking on the youth. Pastor TJ, our lead pastor at EA played which increased the level of fun by 100 since his trash talking ability is absolutely hysterical. It was a great first night that was quite different from what normally goes on during Wednesday night youth services. I'm excited to see what God does with over the next couple of weeks. Worship, silly/gross games and some real spiritual growth amongst the students are things that I want to see incorporated into Wednesdays so we will see what happens. Well, time to get to work on some stuff and figure out my plans for Game 4 of the NBA Finals tonight. (No one cares about the Redhawks.) That's all folks for now. Love you all.

Blessings
Joe
Matthew 22:36-40