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| Back from the Youth Retreat. It was definately a great week and it was amazing to see kids come to Christ. There were a lot of pretty weird and crazy things that happened. Particularly for myself, I ate a cooked earthworm and I came back with no eye brows.
We left Monday morning from church. We left almost on time, so I was very impressed. The drive there was not bad in terms of drive time and there was no traffic. We stopped off at In-N-Out near Stockton and met up with a bunch of other churches there. That's was pretty nice coincidence. We then headed up and actually got there an hour EARLY. So we hung out and waited for everyone else to get there so that we could register. We threw around Justin's football. Thank God he brought that, that was the only thing we could do to kill time. So we got into our cabins (which were pretty decent) and unpacked. We then met up in the worship area and met our groups. At first I was worried for our competitions because my group was made up of young JV kids and older girls. Luckily I had Frances in my group, and she was one of the enforcers during the retreat. The worship time was pretty good, and the worship group was from a church in Las Vegas. The food was not bad considering only about three people were cooking for about 150-160 kids. After we met up in groups to discuss the sermon. The group was silent and shy in the beginning (as with all youth groups), so I had to do all the talking. We later went back to our cabins to get some sleep. Unfortunately, we had Jae Won and Jae Bong in there. The kept talking all night long.
Second day-Surprisingly all of the kids woke up on time and we were able to do our QT/Devotional time. Went with Frances to Starbucks so that she could register online for her classes. We took Justin's car because it was a little more manuverable and he has GPS. The directions she got from the website sucked. We almost got lost, but we found a visitor's area and asked for directions. We were able to find a starbucks (different then the one she wrote down) and had time to spare. After lunch we played one water game and just played in the pool until dinner time. One of the kids forgot their name tags after the swim time we had and so we had our first "consequence". Daniel Chung from LWF was the culprit because Tony Lee from LWF left his name tag on my back pack during the water games and it fell off so they lost track of it. They gave him the chance to switch with a counselor, so he did so I walked up with June Ho (who also forgot something). The consequence: Eat a cooked worm (with butter and garlic of course). So we just looked at each other and said, "SAME TIME". Oh man, that was one of the grossest things I've ever done. After that pretty much everyone at the retreat knew who me and june tao were. That helped the kids in my group open up and speak to me. The worship and sermon was once again very good. That night everyone in our cabin was just worn out and thankfully everyone of them just crashed into bed.
Third day-Not everybody woke up for devotional time and so there were "consequences". This time the kids had to eat worms and this time they were NOT cooked. Watching six people eat live worms is pretty darn nasty. Another consequence was a kid had to eat a frozen wasp. Nasty. We then did some more nasty games. One of the games was, there was a paper bag and inside that bag were ziplock bags filled with random things. I had to eat raw horseradish. Some of the kids had to eat dried shrimp, cat food, butter, mayo, fish, and a bag of coffee beans. We then went to play a competition called "Redemption". So each team sends up a rep. We send a kid named Sam Park. He goes first for the points. The task: Shave your eyebrows. Right when he saw that I saw his heart drop. He was about to cry because he was worried about not having his eyebrows (of course). After about 2-3 minutes, I yelled out, "I'll do it". So I walked up and tag-teamed with Sam. They broke out the clippers and just started shaving. Everybody is now yelling and cheering me on. Man, let me tell you something. If you want to make friends, play a game and have them shave off your eyebrows or eat worms. I think 40 people just walked up to me and asked me about that. There were some more worse things, like Worm Spaghetti, Bobbing for goldfish, have mice crawl over your body, had a cockroach run over your face, and a bunch of other things. That lead to worship time. It brought a lot of energy into the service. We had an amazing time of worship and alter calls. We saw a lot of kids dedicate their life to Christ after hearing a message from Pastor James and Pastor Joe. An amazing time. We got to share prayer requests with our church kids. Had a quick bonfire. I met this amazingly cute kid named Grace who told me her entire life story in a span of two minutes without taking a breath. Jiyung will agree with me about this. But a super cute kid. After that night, everbody was asleep by the time I got to the cabin.
Last day-Woke up and we did our devotional time, had service and cleaned up the area. We left a little late, but we were able to grab some lunch on the way back and get back to church without running into traffic.
Pictures to come later today.
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