Tomorrow morning I’m getting on Southwest flight 12 from Love Field to San Diego. I’ll be sitting with 19 other people (15 adults and 4 kids) heading to the National Youth Workers Convention put on by Youth Specialties. We should hopefully arrive in San Diego around 12:15pm and after luggage and all that head up to North County around 2pm. I haven’t been back to North County too much since I left in February and I’m really excited to introduce my staff to the life I lived when I did youth ministry in Carlsbad. It’s important for me to share my life with my staff so that they can see who I am and why I lead in the way I do. But it also comes with a bit of terror as this is a place that has good/bad memories for me.
With that said we should be hanging out at Ponto tomorrow by 2:30pm and doing a little surfing. Later that night we’re having a bbq at my cousin Donovan’s and will ultimately be ending up at our hotel. The next 6 days are all about loving each other as a youth ministry staff. We are at a point now where our relationships need to grow and we need to care for and support each other in a new way.
This weekend is also about renewing and refreshing. My prayer is that we would come back with a new vision for how to do youth ministry. With and new realization that what we are about is a profession and not just something to be done for a couple of years while we “figure out what we want to do when we grow up”.
I am blessed to have an amazing staff. If I could just tell them that and get them to believe it this weekend it would be worth it.
I REALLY miss this kind of stuff…