Taking Ownership & Upcoming Summer Plans

I love it when we see some of the kids at VO taking a bit of ownership in what we are doing. We have occasionally had people come in and lead some worship on Wednesday nights, but not on a regular basis. Tonight, three of our older girls had gotten together and put a couple songs together and wanted to LEAD in worship. It was really cool!! I was so proud of them. We also were blessed tonight with a delicious dinner from the Gore small group and we are so thankful for them coming and helping out!!

Jeff will soon be moving into the position of getting out of the business world so we are hoping to get a little more organized and focused with VO! We have been praying for this for a year now. He felt called to be out of "working" a little over a year ago, but the timing has not quite been right. We have LOTS of ideas and things we are wanting to implement with VO, but with working full time, we just haven't had the time to get much done. We had planned for VO to just be small for a while- - -just a handful of families we could pour into until we had more time to actually START a ministry. Well, God had different plans! Things took off quickly- - much more quickly than we anticipated or even desired, but who can argue with God. So we have just been trying to manage for the past few months. The building is still not completed, there has been NO decorating the inside, we still need a bigger bus or another smaller bus, and the list goes on and on of things we need to do- - -so hopefully soon we will be able to get to all those things. The neat thing is. . .even though we don't have the fanciest facilities, great entertainment for the kids, or the most organized curriculum, the amount of kids we have coming keeps increasing and we haven't been losing any kids. They just keep coming back. We laugh about how "amateur" we are at doing this "ministry thing" and how we really have nothing "great" at VO or offer anything extremely "fun" for these kids, yet they keep coming back. Sometimes it makes me think we should just keep it like it is- - - -simple and to the point!! We may try to complicate it too much and start losing kids. Who knows! Right now, we really just try to focus on the kids while they are there- - -mingling, talking, caring. . . .instead of worrying too much about getting through our "curriculum" or providing the "best" entertainment.

All that being said, we do have a few things tentatively planned out for this summer. Below is a list of things we are looking forward to:

• Jeff spoke with the head of House of Faith this past weekend and we are going to go down to Texas and meet with them sometime this summer and see how they operate. Their ministry is very similiar to ours and they have about 10 years of experience on us so we want to "pick their brains" and use any help or advice they can give us.
  
• We would like to send about 6-8 kids to Kids Across America camp so we are trying to come up with the funds to do that.
• Sept 13 will be the 2nd annual Walk This Way concert. We are planning to have God's Army, Lecrae, and a few other bands performing at Douglas Park along with workshops for kids and a free dinner.
• Service projects that we can do as a group with some of the older kids at VO so we can teach the children how to serve
• Possibly a trip to Branson and Silver Dollar City
• Neighborhood block parties with our blow ups and grilling food - -Jeff had a pastor from Texas wanting to bring a group up this summer to do their service project with us- - we are considering doing a neighborhood VBS using their volunteers.