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.