Sunday: Worship and Rafting

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Sunday was simply an amazing day!

Each night we have a daily debrief where we share a rose (good thing), a thorn (bad thing), and a bud (something we are looking forward to.) Though there are hopefully no major thorns in our days, there is usually something that doesn't go exactly how we want it to. The hope is that the rose and bud are better than our small thorn. During yesterdays rose, bud, thorn over half the group genuinly could not come up with thorn.

We begin our day at Keystone Church here in Manhattan. We worshiped with the local congregation and heard a wonderful message on the mercy of God, told through the story of Jonah. I was so proud of our students during the service. At one point some of the students came up to the leaders before the service and said "since they are coming to meet us, show we walk around and introduce ourselves to them?" With a big smile, our leaders watched our students mingle through the congregation and go out of there way to meet the locals and members at the church.

We returned home after service to a wonderful Chicken Alfredo lunch and got a quick rest before our afternoon. The itinerary said "Leadership Training" and the students didn't know what the afternoon had in store until we arrived at our final destination. In case you haven't heard, that destination was white water rafting down the Gallatin River. It was awesome to see the group lift up some of the students and leaders who were scared and worried about what was ahead. Only 4 or 5 of the 20 in our had gone rafting before. After a short safety demonstration we teamed up and hit the river.

Rafting was awesome, but seeing an area where I personally believe God was just showing off when he created, and building a "team" spirit with our peers was certainly a special rose in our adventure.

We returned back to the homes after a quick diner where we threw Trent a surprise birthday party and celebrated with cake and ice cream. We shared our rose, bud, and thorn and though the day was fun and exciting it was great to see that all of our students were ready and anxious to get down to business and getting to do what we were called here to do: Serve people and Share Christ!

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