"Failed" Youth Group Event

This weekend our youth ministry held its first lock-in on-site at the church. On Friday i expected the next 72 hours of my life to be some of the busiest and most stressful i'd ever experienced. I had to finish getting ready for the lock-in that day, try to stay awake and clear-minded throughout the event that night, grab some sleep the next morning, attend a friend's wedding on saturday afternoon and evening, spend the rest of the evening cleaning up for the weekend, put the finishing touches on my sunday school lesson that night, try to get some more sleep, teach, worship, prepare another lesson, teach, come home and try to relax, try to get a good night's sleep, try to take a day off on monday, and then start the week all over again on tuesday.

It's now monday evening, and it's amazing how differently the weekend turned out. The lock-in went really well for about 3 hours, and then had to be ended early due to sewer problems. This meant that we got to accomplish most of what we had hoped to with the lock-in (i.e. connecting with the teens in the community), but with the added bonus of getting to go home and go to sleep early. The massive amount of clean up that was going to be required resulted in us skipping the wedding. Even though we spent most of the day at the church, it was a lot of fun (for me) because it meant hanging out with people and doing work that wasn't too difficult. The sewer still wasn't fixed by saturday night so Sunday school and youth group both got cancelled. This meant that i didn't have to work on any lessons on saturday, and that i'll have a lot less work to do this week since i've got two lessons half-ready that i wasn't able to use this weekend. Which means that i'll actually get to take a few days off for thanksgiving this week, which i wasn't sure i was going to be able to do.

It's just amazing to me how God can do things so incredibly unexpected. We never know what's getting ready to happen. I'm not sure that God allowed the sewers to back up to make things easier on me and some other people in the church (and maybe its sheer arrogance that i even think it's a possibility), but it just reminds me that we never know what God is going to do. Which means that no situation is impossible, because even when it look like something has to happen, it might not (think Red Sea). And when we worry, we never know if what we're worried about is even going to happen. Same thing with fear. Life is just predictable enough to get us in the habit of predicting it though, and i guess i need to always remember that anything could happen at any moment.