Hello June!
Totally meant to make a newsletter for May. But here’s June!
We are plugging along with fundraising and mentally/emotionally/physically/spiritually preparing for our move in August.
Youth Ministry has been such a special and pivotal experience for us. Building relationships with the teens in our youth group has been our purpose for the past 7 years and we have loved it deeply. We thought it would be sweet for this newsletter to reflect a little bit on Childress church of Christ.
This church has been such a welcoming place to grow. Neither of us had ministry experience prior to this job (apart from one summer internship, and a couple summers spent as church camp counselors), and when we moved to Childress we felt immediately loved and encouraged. I (Kelsea) shared this with another ministry friend a few years back and she asked me “How? Did they have committees in place? An organization of some sort in charge of that?”
NOPE.
That’s just how the people here are: warm, welcoming, friendly, community-minded. Childress people are affectionate, and looking back it’s sweet to see how little we knew or understood and yet the people we were living alongside and serving with were immediately rooting for us. It’s even sweeter to note presently how some things don’t change, and Childress church of Christ’s love and support is one of those things.
But let’s go back to August 2016.
We remember mommas bringing us Childress t-shirts so we would have “Bobcat Blue” in our wardrobes. Families invited us over for meals to get to know us and their kids. So many people from the church family - adults and teens - spent many days at our house painting and working in the yard to help prepare our home for us.
These were not instances that faded over time. The family at Childress church of Christ has consistently poured into us. Through “Hey come grab a bite with us!” texts to surprise envelopes of money for a weekend getaway. People have brought us food when we were sick, concert tickets for us to have a night out, and given us endless messages of encouragement and prayer. Teens tag our cars, leave us sticky notes, bring us gifts, buy us sonic drinks, and audibly tell us they love us in in actual public…the list of goodness just goes on. It’s beautiful to see the ways the body has loved on us!
God calling us to a new ministry is maybe the only thing that could have brought us away from Childress. There’s just so much goodness here. And we are mindful that many youth ministers leave with a less-than-ideal experience. We are SO grateful to The Lord and His goodness He’s poured out over us during our time in Childress. And a small silver lining is that we get to continue to “do ministry” with Childress as a supporter and sponsor of Through Jordan.
As our time in youth ministry dwindles, we are praising God for the opportunities He’s blessed us with here. And we hope to make the most of them until it’s time for us to move.
That being said, we will sign off for now because we’re about to go play Cops and Robbers with our teens!
- Drew and Kelsea
