Desert Challenge and My Story Night

Many things have been happening here with the church.

The three days right after Christmas we had something called Desert Challenge, where teens from all over the gulf came for three days to our church. It was a very powerful, fun, encouraging, crazy, and challenging time. Every day we heard speakers on the subjects "reach, keep, and empower." There were also different topics we could choose from to go to seminars for.
We played games, went to the beach, ate, talked, had long worship sessions, and a "no talent show."
It was great fun and impacted most of us a lot.
To me the most powerful message was the one "keep," where he talked about keeping and applying what we'd learned and letting go of things that were holding us back from giving every part of our lives to God.
After that I had a good talk with some friends and we decided to hold each other accountable.

Just this past week at Oasis (youth group) we had something called "My Story Night." About six of us shared about a struggle God had been helping us through. It was encouraging to hear others talk about their walk with God and relate to how they had been feeling.
Speaking in public is not something I am generally interested in or do well at, but eventually I started to think about it and decided to say I was willing to share. Just after that my well group leader called and asked if I would, so I was just like "Ok God, I guess you really want me to do this." I was glad to have a chance to talk about my (past) struggle anyway, to get it out, but at the same time it was quite hard since I hadn't really talked about it to anyone.
Others spoke about struggle with friends and with God, and the worship time fit very well. When it was my turn I was really uncomfortable, but as I began talking it was alright. I shared about the time about a year ago when, for a year I fought against feelings of inadequacy and physical self-hate, on the verge of an eating disorder, and how God brought me out of that before it got further, using Becca's talk at a BarlowGirl concert.
It was encouraging talking to people afterward, although we had to leave quite quickly.


I am so grateful for the youth group and church here....it has been a huge blessing and I have SO many awesome friends through it. They are so crazy fun!