Daniel and I have been helping out with the youth group at our church basically since the first week that we started going to MAC (Martensville Alliance Church), which was, oh, about six months ago. Key word being "helping", not leading. Daniel's cousin Ryan has been leading this group for the last seven years or so I think. So last night Ryan calls at like 5:30 (youth starts at 6:30) and asks if we can cover for him. I said yes and he told me everything that he'd had planned. I'm sure I sounded very confident that we could handle things ;), but inside I was going "Crap, we've never done this by ourselves! The kids won't listen, they're going to think it's boring and never come back!! AH!!!!" So we managed to get to the church before most of the kids got there and started setting up. The theme was Make Your Own Pizza. They were put into four groups and for every game/competition that their team won they got to go and pick a topping for their pizza. I was amazed at how smoothly everything actually went, and the kids definitely had fun. God is good! It's not easy trying to keep the attention of 23 jr high kids! But we got enthusiastic responses to the games and they loved their pizza's. I was pretty exhausted by the end, and then we had sr high afterwards, which really didn't take much energy. They're a pretty laid back group, and we generally just hang out and play board games. However, we rarely have more than 6-8 youth that come. Last night there were 10! I'm absolutely loving watching how God is bringing people into our group and giving us a chance to befriend them and witness. Most of the sr high come from Christian backgrounds, but the majority of the jr high have never heard the most basic Bible stories before. Last night with the jr high we started watching a video series that is basically working it's way through the major stories of the Bible. We were going to stop after one chapter, but when Daniel paused it there was a resounding "Hey!" from the kids. They were totally into it, so we kept watching till it was time for them to go home. We'd really appreciate prayer for us as leaders and for the kids, that their hearts would be open to hearing the gospel.

It's been such a long time since I've blogged, and my life has changed so much that I decided to completely revampe my page and start over. Daniel and I have been married for almost a year and a half, have moved six times and are now living in Saskatchewan. He's working at a plastics manufacturing plant, and this coming Monday I will be starting a full time job working with people with intellectual disabilities, helping out with the day program. Very excited, since the job I just quit involved shift work (evenings/nights/weekends), which meant that basically any time Daniel was at home I was gone to work. No fun at all! God has been good to us, though we've had a lot of struggles, He's made us that much stronger together.

Today I'm working on unpacking our new appartment that we moved into about two weeks ago. God was good in finding us this place. Let me tell how it all came about...

We moved to Saskatchewan in November last year when Daniel got a job with a plumbing company in Saskatoon. Initially we lived with his sister because we moved out so quickly (two weeks!) and thought we would save some money by living with her. By January we were ready to start looking for a place of our own, and found a cute little house to move into for the beginning of March. It was an old house, but had two bedrooms and a basement for storage. We were just getting settled in when near the end of March we got a notice from the rental agency saying that the house was going to be torn down and that we had to be out by the end of April. Man, was that ever a blow! They gave us incentive that if we moved out by April 15 they would give us our March and April rent back. Let's just say we were determined to be out by then, even if it meant moving in with Daniel's parents till we could find something else. So we started looking and found this place through the same rental agency, and it was made available to us for April 10! Isn't God good?!

In the midst of all this I was working nights and evenings while praying that He would provide me with a day job, and He did! I start on Monday and am SO excited!!! But I should get unpacking, since I have a goal to finish everything by Friday. =)