Venture 2014

Venture 2014 was this past weekend! Venture is the Discipleship Now weekend for our youth but it involves so many people from our church. Many people open their homes for these students to stay at and college students come back for the weekend to lead the students. It's always so much fun and our Youth Ministry team always does a fantastic job of putting everything together!

I was excited when our youth leaders asked Brian and I host lunch at our house for one of the groups. I so wish we could have helped all weekend but we had a wedding to attend on Saturday evening so we couldn't commit the whole time but wanted to do what we could, so Saturday for lunch, we hosted eleven 9th grade boys! I'm not sure why I cleaned all Friday night because I'm pretty sure not one of those boys cared if the house was clean or not :)

They actually even brought lunch with them. We all had Chick-Fil-A sandwiches for lunch as well as chips, cookies and drinks. I did make some chocolate chip cookies and those were gone very quickly.

This one snacked on Cheetos and cookies the whole time! I think she was confused why there were all these boys at our house but she quietly warmed up to them

I'm pretty sure that these boys loved Mallory's princess castle just as much as she did!

The Venture videographer, Michael David, came over and Mallory made the Venture Video. You can see it here - she's about 30 seconds in

After we had all eaten, we all sat in the living room and Brian and I got to tell a little about ourselves and the boys got to ask any question they wanted. I figured with 9th grade boys, there probably wouldn't be any too deep questions but they did have some good ones. At first they asked "who was our favorite superhero?", "what was our first car?" and then later on we got some questions like "what's the most important thing in a relationship?" It was so interested to see these young boys and all they have going for them. I just wanted to hug them all and let them know they are all loved!

After question and answer time, we went outside to play some more before they had to leave

Mallory loved sharing her trampoline and the boys loved playing football (with the soccer ball) in the big backyard. I knew that would come in handy one day!

One of the boys fell and got a grass stain on his jeans and said "My Mom is going to kill me." I told him I'm sure she would be ok because she knew you were having fun at Venture

So blessed to be able to have spent time with these awesome young men in Christ!

Sunday morning, we all got to wear our Venture shirts to church. I showed Mallory her shirt on Saturday and told her she could wear it to church and Sunday morning, she asked where her shirt was so she could wear it!

One of Venture's biggest supporters!

I'm so glad we were able to have these boys come to our house. God really used this small amount to time to teach me so much! Before the boys came over, I was wondering where they were all going to sit. We love our house - it is perfect for us but I used to think that because we didn't have that big of a living room/dining room/kitchen that we couldn't host a lot of things because it would be crowded. We have a table that we can put a leaf in it to make it bigger but we only have 4 chairs to go with it.  I was really concerned that these boys were going to wonder where they were all going to sit and how we were going to fit them all.

Those boys just walked in and sat in the floor, on the couch, just wherever there was space. They didn't care that I didn't have a huge dining room table for them to sit at. They didn't care that we didn't have the biggest space. They came, sat, ate and fellowshipped and we all had the best time! God reminded me that this is not my house - it is His and we are to use it for His glory. People just want to be loved. Lesson learned and you are all welcome for dinner anytime...it just may be on TV trays :)