To give everyone a little background, for the last four years I've been working with a group of junior high and highschool students in a program called Awana. I have a class of kids that I like to refer to as "my kids". They're juniors this year and they're pretty special to me. In Awana, once you get into highschool there's this thing called Summit where churches from accross the US come together to compete at a national level. Since my kids are juniors this year, this was my 3rd year going on the trip.
What was noticeably different about this year was that it was the first year our group came as Desert Sun instead of Palmcroft Baptist. A situation than nine months ago seemed incredelous has turned into one of the most amazing situations I've ever been blessed to be a part of (even if it was a little reminiscent of a certain camp situation). The sense of unity and pride that our group had in who we are was amazing.
One of the best parts of the trip was the interest that we recieved from the Awana organization itself. We're currently the only church that attends Summit who uses Awana as their primary youth program. We've gained enough attention from people fairly high up at Awana HQ to warrant them wanting to fly out here to check out our club and to send people out here to learn about how we're doing things. That alone makes everything that this group has been through in the last year beyond worth it. In the past I've seen how facing adversity can make a group stronger, but I've never seen a better example of it than I have with this group. You already knew that I thought that they're amazing, but my love for this group just continues to grow.
Now, for the real details. Since last fall I've said that this would be a fun year to get two teams into the Platinum Round of Bible Quizzing for the first time ever. Our quiz day was full of lots of ups and downs (I could write an entire blog post just about that), but at the end of the day we did manage to get two teams into the Platinum Round. We had one Silver Round team, one Gold Round team, and then 7th and 4th in the country in the Platinum Round. All of our teams quizzed well. None of them were the kind of teams who tried to slip through by not buzzing in and just making it above the curve. I always tell the kids that I'd rather answer speed questions and fail to make it to the next round than answer zero speed questions and slip into the next round because of someone else's mistakes.
The Gold Round in particular was probably my favorite of the day because it was a room full of twelve teams that all buzzed in at least once and the questions were solid. There was no crashing and burning by any of the teams. It was just an all around great round of good quizzing. Two of our teams tying for second place in the room didn't hurt either. ;)
Our church has never been the strongest at volleyball or Awana Games, but the kids always enjoy the experience. I actually enjoy volleyball (did everyone just hear me say that?) because it's the competition where I just get to sit back and cheer them on.
As for Fine Arts, I don't think I've ever enjoyed it as much as I did this year. We have a lot of kids with amazing talents and it's fun to get to see them put on display. It's also a wonderful break from the craziness of quizzing and generally running around.
There are lots of little memorable moments of the trip, from the little things that resulted from me getting to drive a rental car this year to some of the individual conversations that I got to have with some of the kids, it was just an all around great experience. When people ask me about the trip the first thing they usually want to know is how my team did. And while it's fun to say that I coached the 4th ranked team in the country...that's not what comes to mind when I think about Summit. It's the little things like those individual conversations with the students, or the deeper level of friendships that occurred leading up to Summit, or the student who blossomed right in front of my eyes during the trip, or the parents that I love almost as much as the kids, or....just all of it. A year from now people will remember things like the fact that we had two teams in the Platinum Round, but what I remember will be far different. And it's those memories that remind me of how blessed I am to be a part of this whole experience.
