Breakaway weekend

This weekend I went on a church sponsored trip to a winter camp in Michigan. Besides the horrific bus malfunctions and delays, the trip was wonderful. If I were in middle school I would've been so excited about the whole trip. And the whole time it was action packed and there were a lot of fun activities to do including snow tubing (tube-ing), paintball, swimming, rock climing, basketball, video games, Euro-bungee, and lots of other fun stuff. I really have to compliment the church on how well they cater to kids desires and make the camp fun and even make the worship services entertaining (all 3 of them). There were supposed to be four. However, the bus ride took an extra 3 hours on Friday so they had to cancel that evening's events by the time we arrived at 2AM. I really appreciate how they make the services entertaining for kids and that the messages are tailored to fit their lives. If I had this as a kid I probably wouldn't have went through my super pessimistic stage regarding religion. It is truly amazing that they were able to have 19 busses full of kids behave as well as they did too, but that just goes to show how tailoring everything towards the kids can subdue their boredom and keep them from going crazy :P

Personally, I really enjoyed going and I was able to connect more with a lot of the other leaders. I hadn't really talked to any of them up to this point and it was really nice to finally have a couple conversations with these people and learn that mot of them aren't really that different from me and that they also had their periods of un-religiousness. You know, I'm still on the fringe, but I'm trying here :P I, of course don't let the kids onto any of this. I don't want to be the reason that they leave the church! But back to the main topic, I also took a lot of pictures while I was there. I really wish I had a DSLR camera so that I could take a virtually unlimited amount of pictures. I got off about 25 shots, but because the film was old, most of the low light pictures have a very washed out appearance and the colors are off (probably because the film lost some of its sensitivity at different levels for each color mask) I learned that color film actually has 4 layers of "photo receptors" one, for each primary color and one for black and white. The pictures I took outside with ample lighting came out very well though. Because this weekend was so good for me and I think that the kids loved it too, I would totally do it again!