We just got back from taking high school kids to weekend camp at Sharp Top Cove in Jasper, Ga this past weekend. It was really fun. My parents took care of the kids while I got to hang out with cabin full of junior and seniors in high school-who are hilarious really. My sweet friend from when I did YL at Dreher HS in Columbia, Megan Hafer came up to visit for the afternoon. We realized that we met almost ten years ago, when she was 14 years old. Now that's a long time! It was great seeing her and she told me that she stalks my blog, so I thought that I would give her and Cassie Markham shoutouts!
Anyway, we got back last night and caught up around the house. We found a house online that Matt and I really wanted to go look at, so we set up an appointment with our realtor today to go look at it. I have never had this experience before, but as soon as we crossed the threshold of the house, I knew that our visit was over. The house was terrible. I mean TERRIBLE. And they are listing it for $199,000. $199,000 for a crappy house. Are you kidding me??? The piece of property is lovely and the location is amazing, but NO WAY. I mean the whole house had a drop ceiling, mold was everywhere and it was made for tiny people. Ughh. I don't believe that we are ever going to figure out this house thing.
We had YL club tonight and instead of a typical club, we played Bunco and it was awesome. Kids had a great time and nine kids signed up to go to summer camp tonight. We only just told them about camp yesterday AT camp. It is really fun to do YL at a school where kids are excited about what you are doing and how you want to be in their lives. So I gave the talk tonight and I talked about when I was in high school and what a wreck I was.
I showed them my senior year report card. Yes, I still have a report card from when I was in high school. I made GREAT grades, but I had over 45 absences altogether in my classes from one semester. I had only five official absences, but I missed over 45 classes. Yes, I cut classes. A lot of them in high school. But it never affected my GPA, that's the kind of high school I went to. (My mom and dad must be so proud right now). I then talked about how everything looked good on the outside, but I was a mess. I was so nervous about getting caught or slipping up somehow. I didn't have very close friends. Basically, I had a list of regrets about a mile long in high school. And, as any self respecting high school students does...I wrote poetry to try to be deep and real about my situation. So I made an overhead of one of the poems out of my poetry book that was in fact titled, "Regret". As funny as I try to make things, this was REALLY vulnerable to share in front of 60 high schoolers. It's not a bad poem, but I had to get dramatic at the end and wrote, "My regrets leave me nothing but a trail of tears."
Yes, I am a pile of cliches all in one place.
But, the point that I was making is that all of us live with regrets basically because we are unable to live up to the glorious standard that God has set for mankind. Which in turns, forces us to rely on him rather than ourselves. Unfortunately, we have convinced ourselves that OUR way is much better than his way and thus REGRET takes over because it never plays out well when we take our lives into our hands.
So this is what my talk was all about. After club, we all go to Wendy's to eat and hang out. We gave a kid from the club a ride over there and we were just making small talk about how school was after coming back from Sharp Top and he said, "It's okay, I mean it can be pretty hard to be back. It makes me wants to cry a trail of tears." Thanks. Thanks a lot. Then he went on to quote some his poetry from high school that is over the top. My favorite line of his was about how his life was like, "eating brains in the Big Lots parking lot."
Ahh high school. Don'tcha just want to go back?
