Crossing Over

We had a great weekend in Keystone at CROSSOVER! We looked at four key areas of our life and how to have victory in them: words, purity, peer pressure, and hypocrisy. The reason we tear someone down with our words is to make us look good... because we are insecure. The reason we lower standards in dating relationships is because we are ...insecure. The reason we fall to peer pressure is because we care more about what the group thinks than what God thinks... really it's because we are insecure. When we claim to be a christian, and fail in these areas, we fall into the category of being a hypocrite and do damage to the body of Christ.

Monday morning we finished up the weekend talking about the key to victory in all these areas: finding our security in Christ. If we are secure in who God made us; if we are secure in who we are in Christ, then the battle is won. We'll be encouraging with our words, guard our purity, and care more about what God thinks then the group. We had a great weekend together and I can already see multiple victories in our students lives as they CROSSED OVER the masking tape line.


Here are a few pictures and thoughts on the weekend...

We had great worship! Thank you for making it happen!

This was a combined retreat, though I don't have a picture of it, as one of the middle school girls was praying at the altar after one of the messages, one of our high school seniors knelt down with her. It was great to see the Body of Christ work together like that!

I found out that Katie Kalina loves to have her picture taken.

One of the highlights for me was watching Georgia on a big screen TV throw up 45 points on Auburn! Hey, someone has to beat Auburn.

The food was tremendous!!! Thank you so much Judy and Alex!!! Wow, I think I am going to have to buy bigger pants! Alex, seriously we need to talk about "Slaughterhouse Bar-B-Q", I think you can put Sonny's out of business!

The 1st part of the weekend we had a sheet set out on a table off to the side. It was sort of a confessional sheet. Students wrote out a message to God in highlighter, then on Sunday night we set a black light to it, talked about hypocrisy and then went outside to burn it as a symbol of God's forgiveness and forgetfulness!

Sunday afternoon we went on a wild goose chase to Gainesville to find a bowling alley. Man, people in Gainesville paint their building some ugly colors! Caddi gave us all professional bowling tips. Tyler Stoval bowled a 195 - sign him up Cheryl!

Aaron can tell some pretty haunted tales. On behalf of some of the youth who need EKG's now, thanks Aaron!

Aaron also told us that he saw a roach in the shower so big, he said he could ride it!

About Linda... everyone knows her but no one has ever met her. She still freaks everyone out.

Sean Brown ran the sound for us this weekend, he looks tired doesn't he? Of course he wasn't up at 2:00 in the morning helping us put fake deer in the middle school cabin.

Some of the students had fun on the climbing wall. That thing was so tall, you needed repelling equipment to get down.

I found out that Luke Burns, Hunter Torres, and the rest of the middle school boys like to make things out of clay, gross things - and then leave them all over the high school guys bathroom floor. Truth be known, there's probably still a little clay in the high school cabin. Oh, and thanks guys for the cold shower Monday morning!

I'm not gonna lie, the messages were great, but the best part about the weekend was the carpet ball!!! C'mon Mark, can you build us one or two? We're gonna need them by the next FNL on November 30th :-)

We DID have a great weekend! God really broke through some barriers in our students lives this weekend. For those of you who prayed for us - THANK YOU!!!