Lifegroups & Tutoring

Hello everyone! It has been a little while since I blogged. I intended to blog shortly after Monday's Life-group section, but then I just never sat down and did it. With projects, readings, events, and other things it's really tough to just sit down and so things like this. Yet I understand that I am just presenting excuses right now, so I will stop making excuses and update.

I will take about my College Life-groups as well as my 8th Grade Life-groups. First, the College Life-group.

Since John was out of town, I did the main teaching and leading of the guys group for the College one. I've done this a couple times in the summer, but that was about it. It's such a different feeling teaching in front of your peers than a group that is younger than yourself. I don't mind it so much in College Classrooms now, but I was really nervous addressing it this past Monday because I was taking a piece of scripture that I struggled with and had to present it to them (It was on Galatians 3:1-14). The reason I say I struggled with this was for more than one reason. I wanted to figure out not only what this passage was saying, but how we should apply it personally and as a church reaching those who don't know Christ. I had to ask myself some tough questions and do some digging (I quoted some theologians and even the Greek words that were used in the text). I finally came to a point where I asked two questions. One was do we as Christians fall into the same thinking as the Galatians? Then I asked a follow up to that question of Liberalism vs. Legalism. Regarding the church being too Liberal with scripture, I asked if we were at a point where non-Christians saw no significant difference in our lives vs. theirs. In regards to Legalism, I asked if we as a church are so fixed in our tradition/way of doing things that we are so inclusive where no non-Christian will want to come to church and we are then guilty of what the Galatians were doing in respect to putting emphasis on the Law rather than Jesus. Then after we talked about that, I asked the group what it meant to them personally that Jesus made the sacrifice for us so that we no longer had to be slaves to the law.

For my 8th grade Life-group, we went over a couple things. For the first 10-15 minutes, we discussed if Christ's Biographies were accurate (i.e. the validity of scripture). That was really cool because we looked at the Bible as a book and the credibility of eyewitnesses, the original manuscripts, and the people/authors within the Bible. It was very cool. Then for the last 15 minutes, I had to High School students, Harrison Hall and Chaz Allman, talk about their trip to Guatemala and the offering that the Youth group is doing for that community to have a youth pastor. I got a lot out of it, and I think they did too. It just goes to show that it doesn't matter watch age you are, God works through everyone at anytime.

This was my last week of Tutoring at Nolensville. I still have to write my Case Study, so I still have a good amount of work to do. I am kind of glad that I don't have to come up with two different lessons each week for this, but I'm sad because it was fun going to the school and working with this student.

I was going to talk about something else, but I realize that this blog is long enough! I hope you all have a great rest of the day!

Poetry Slam, Testimony, Fall Break, and other things

If I think about it, I could just be smart and put tags on my blog and have a more creative title. However, I think that the title can be a gauge of what the post will be about, so I'm not too upset with that. I think the creative titles will come in the future but for now, we'll just leave it.

My partner and I won a Poetry Slam earlier this week. A Poetry Slam is a competition in which poets get up in front of an audience, perform an original poem (or in this case just a poem), and receive scores from judges based on how they perform. Since I read with expression and showed off my acting skills, we won! It was a great poem too. I may post it for future reference. I didn't get anything for winning, just the satisfaction of being number one. Which is fine with me and I'm assuming my partner as well.

I decided to do something different with Life-groups this week. We've been going over the Case for Christ and just finished up the section about Jesus. That section included questions like, "Did Jesus think he was God?" "Was he crazy to make that claim?" and "How does Jesus match up to the identity of the Messiah?" I thought that this would be a good point to say, "Okay we have the answers here, but what does that matter? We know about Jesus, but how does that affect our lives?" So, I gave my testimony about what it meant in my life. I know that God was with me when I did it because I had a large number of students show up and for 20 minutes, they gave me their full attention...You know how almost impossible that is with Middle School?!? It was amazing.

I am on Fall Break now. We actually had an extension for fall break because of what happened at MTSU. There is a lot of details to this so if you want to read about it, go to www.mtsu.edu and click on the link at the bottom. It will tell you what's going on. I did have tutoring, a project, and Junior Achievement (thank goodness I have learned patience) those two days, so it wasn't exactly time off. But I didn't have to go to class, so it saved me money on gas! I really didn't mean for that to rhyme. My apologies.

Other than that, everything is going well. I'm really busy with schoolwork, so having days completely off is really nice. I also was able to do stuff with the College Ministry like our Dinner and a Movie last night. That's where we watch a movie, have dinner in a theme of that movie, and discuss biblical principles. Last night was The Legend of Bagger Vance. I joked around with John saying, "I hope there's enough symbolism in this movie to talk about!" If you haven't seen the movie, there's a lot in there.

Well, I need to be going. Have a great rest of the day!