Adventure With Christ!

The Salvation Army has a program for school-age boys called Adventure Corps.  At my church, we have two sections of the Adventure Corps program - the Explorers, grades 1-5, and the Rangers, grades 6-12.  I am blessed with the privilege to teach the older group of boys for our youth nights.

We resumed our youth nights in January after taking November and December off (a necessary evil to meet the logistical demands of the Christmas Kettle fundraising season).  As is my custom in the class, I had the boys vote through the eight categories of Ranger badges bracket style to determine what our next set of activities would include.  After the voting had been finalized, the boys decided to tackle a badge in the "outdoors" category.

Outdoors.  In Minnesota.  In January.

And so, I decided to do instruction from that category on the Orienteering badge, using as many class periods as I could doing activities that could be done indoors (studying maps, learning about compasses, etc.).  In one particular class period, I had picked some verses from the Bible that pertained to orienteering themes - verses such as Proverbs 3:5-6 and Psalm 119:105.  Upon reading these verses and doing some discussion on their meaning and application, I quickly learned that several of my boys had never even as much as opened a Bible in their lives, but they did thoroughly enjoy discussing it!

After much prayer and review of the Ranger handbook, I put orienteering on hold (to be continued when the snow is gone).  We are now working on a badge in the Bible category entitled Christian Life, which allows us to do some digging into the basics of finding and living out a faith in Jesus Christ.  I'll admit, I was a bit wary upon starting this badge, thinking that my boys would find it boring.  So imagine my surprise when not only were they actively engaged in the class time discussion, but they didn't even want to go to game time when class was over and requested to stay and continue our discussions!

The purpose of my life is to love God, to love others, and to lead others to love God.  I am truly blessed to be serving these boys, and it is my prayer that God would use me to help them either grow in their faith or discover their faith for the first time.  I'm finding more and more that this life of service doesn't come with dull moments.  As the Adventure Corps motto boldly states, this life is an "Adventure With Christ!"

Comments

  1. bec314wisMarch 9, 2014 at 5:05 PM

    Great! Could use do orienteering and geocaching together? Don't know about the badges, but growing up we had fun "racing" to a Bible verse...

    ReplyDelete

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