Rollercoaster

I thought last week was an emotional rollercoaster, but that was nothing to this week! This week was “Healing life’s hurts” and basically it is giving God permission to root out anything in our past that has created problems in allowing us to meet with him. I’ll go into that a bit more in the teaching summary post.
But we started with some teaching on Monday morning, lunch time to recover and then more teaching in the afternoon. The day hadn’t finished there though, after the afternoon teaching we had small group and I have to say it was the scariest small group session ever! Emily took us to the upstairs storage room, and we all sat there in our duvets (because it was really cold in there). Then we did a thing called ‘Walking in the light’. Basically Emily sat us down and we were given the chance to confess any deep dark secrets, any hidden sins, that we felt we should share. Although I trust my small group this was not nice. However there is something very powerful about confessing yours sins out loud. It means they are no longer secret and the devil can’t hold that “Oh you could never tell anyone about that, you are so awful, no one will ever like you if you tell them that” kind of line on you. I was of course adamant that I wasn’t going to go first as we all sat there for a minute, two minutes, five minutes with no one saying anything, I realised that I was going to share first, so I promptly shared half of mine. You kind of feel that you want to know how bad everyone else’s is before telling yours. However once one person had gone everyone went and many people’s were very similar. To be honest despite it being horribly scary, it was incredibly releasing. Emily prayed for each of us after our turn and it was so releasing we went round again to add if we wanted to (so I said the second half of mine). We then did some painting :) and we were all chatting much more than before which was cool. Each of the small groups had done the same thing and so it was really odd talking to everyone after because obviously you can’t share what people in your group said (the whole point of small group is that it is a safe place), so we were all talking really abstractly about what we had done and the experiences we had had. It was quite strange.
Tuesday was another hard day, but made much better by the fact that I got a couple of parcels through the post. One was some birthday presents that mum sent on, the other was from my wonderful friend Jo who picked the best day for her ‘Chocolate ministry’ package to arrive. It was a lovely bar of English galaxy, and I finished the whole thing myself (except for two squares that Sophie had). I felt piggy but I felt much better afterwards! We had soaking in the afternoon which was very much needed. It helped to calm everyone down, catch up on a bit of sleep :-p and meet with God.
Wednesday afternoon was small group again. This time though it was all about having fun. We teamed up with Kaleena’s small group and spread out some large sheets of paper, then went wild with some paints.


Some people finger painted, some brush painted, I hand and foot painted! It was so much fun hee hee.



So now we have finished healing life’s hurts (the teaching at least, I have a feeling God will carry on working in us on this for quite a while to come). Now it’s on the the “Fresh Wind” youth conference!!!