So a few days ago, a middle school student from my ministry, facebooked me a message and told me that she was so moved by a video that we showed  on Sunday morning during middle school worship (More on the video later) that she wrote a song about it. Well last night at youth group, she sang the song to me… And it was amazing, touching, and deep!

The song was about a young girl locked in darkness, who is seeking freedom, love, and grace… What stirred this song – a video called BAHT! This video is about a ministry called Rapha House. Rapha House buys young girls out of slavery and puts them in halfway houses, which in turn gives these young girls hope, love, and life skills to live beyond slavery. Our student ministry is giving it’s Sunday morning offerings to the Rapha House, so that they can make a difference in a young girl’s life.

Surprises… Sometimes you never know how a middle school student might respond to challenges

In the month of February, LifeBridge holds a food drive to help supplement the needs of the Our Center (The Our Center provides food, clothing, and other such things to those who need a help every now and then). In the past LifeBridge would do this by having a canned food drive. However, the Our Center can only give out so many cans of green beans “if you know what I mean” so they asked LifeBridge to donate money instead of canned food. To meet this need, LifeBridge has decided to do a “Fast 4 Food” event. This is where we are asking our church members to fast from something , such as starbucks, a fastfood meal, and etc during the month of February and give the money to the church, which will then be donated to the Our Center. Brian Mavis came up with this concept after reading about how early Christians would fast from a meal in order to feed the poor and hungry.

Well our student ministry at LifeBridge wanted to add a little funny twist to the Fast 4 Food for our students. So we decided to add a beard-off to the mix: this is where we have challenged our students to fast from something in the month of February and give the money to the Our Center via the church. We are calling the beard-off “The Full on Grizzly Adams Fast 4 food Beard-off.” What this consists of is that Trevor Oakes (High School Pastor), Jay Ewing (Tri-towns Campus Youth Pastor), and myself (Middle School Pastor) are going to grow out our beards and hair, and which ever group gives the most money from their fasting (High School youth, Tri-towns youth, and Middle School youth) will decide what their respective youth pastor gets to look like, i.e., beard trim and hair cut…

At the end of every week in the month of February, I will post a picture of what I look like ultimately posting the final outcome of what the winning youth pastor looks like… or should I say losing youth pastor