Going Public: San Francisco

I know it's been an extremely long time since I've blogged and I'm sure the two people that read my blog are itching to know what I've been up to. :-)

July was extremely busy for me, including the first week of August. Here's what I did:

After getting back from vacation Mike and I leapt right into Going Public. I was not looking forward to it. You see, Going Public is a Choir Tour/Mission Trip, more emphasis on Choir Tour than on missions in the past (at least that's what I'd been told). I have nothing against Choir Tour, especially since I went with my church all four years of high school, but I was not looking forward to going as a leader on a trip where I wasn't going to have much to do. Yet once again in my life I was wrong and I found that I enjoyed it a ton and was sad when it ended. I learned a whole lot of things on the trip. The first being that high school students are amazing and no one should ever underestimate the things they can do and the difference they can make. I would have to say that the trip in its entirety surprised me by the amount of missions type things we did. About two-thirds of our students were in the city of San Francisco doing things like working at the Rescue Mission, doing manual labor at a church, fixing up a place called Page Street Baptist Center near The Haight District and Evangelism all over the place. I was with the one-third of students that were in the suburbs at Western Hills Church doing a Kid's Club and Sports Camp. I was able to help with the Kid's Club which I love doing and was right up my alley.

I also learned that those punk kids in junior high can grow up to be pretty amazing high school students. As a lot of people know I am not very good with clingy people or students who have no respect for adults or leaders. I had the opportunity to work on this area of my life while in San Francisco. I was put in a room with two other girls, one which thought that I didn't like her because she was such a punk in junior high (and yes she was a very punky, annoying kid in high school) and the other girl in my room is kind of clingy and says things that are very rude most of the time. I was actually very disappointed at first with my room assignment, but by the end of the week I'm glad that I was put into that situation. I'm not saying that these girls still don't do some things that I'm sure will get on my nerves in the future but I look at them in a whole new perspective now. They are both just girls that need to be loved and they need to be told that someone cares about them.

Overall, God gave me a whole new outlook on Going Public and I am definitely looking forward to going next year and making all new memories.

Oh! One absolutely, amazingly, awesome thing we got to do was go to Monster Park where the San Francisco 49ers play. We were able to go to the locker room, the field, the steps (I stupidly ran up thinking I could do it just like the high school students; almost killing myself and/or passing out I'm not sure!), and the press room (media and written).