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Talk about a full day. The high schoolers showed up at the church at 7:30am to finish prepping brownies and ice cream, stood up front during first service, listened to the sermon, booked it across the church to get to their stations in the space of a single prayer, served dozens of people at each station, went back into service to stand up front second hour, served dozens more people at each station, and cleaned up to be out of there by 1:30pm.

(Somewhere in there I checked my fifth graders into middle school Sunday school, got to look at next year's fourth and fifth grade curriculum, and slipped into Summer Sunday school for about twenty five minutes.)

The Bridgetown kids went home, and the Haiti kids scattered to get food.

(We went to my cousin's birthday party.)

By 3:00pm the Haiti team was back at the church for cross cultural training with the Warm Springs team and a team of adults going to Rwanda. We trained nearly nonstop from 3:00 - 7:30pm. They fought to stay awake and take in information that they really wanted to hear - or knew that they would have really wanted to hear, if it weren't Sunday afternoon, when their bodies thought they were supposed to be napping.

But, they got a second wind eventually, and, by the time the final session rolled around and the senior pastor got up to talk about spiritual warfare, they were all ears.

The first several sessions were things that they need to know, but that many of them don't realize yet that they need to know, or haven't been on any sort of cross-cultural trip to even have any concept of why they might possibly need to know. (Seriously, I got a degree in this stuff. These trainings are well and thoroughly put together. At this rate, we might just start our own missions college.) The spiritual warfare stuff, though, they understand.

Several of the kids told me afterwards that the final teaching made fighting to stay awake so, so worth it.

Which, is good. This isn't an easy trip. Physically it isn't bad - although uncomfortable for kids who have never been out of the States - but, the emotional, mental, and spiritual energy it requires takes a toll. And it's not the sort of thing you just forget about once you come home! They'll need the information they were just given, the returning kids maybe even more than the first timers.

After all of that... half of them ran straight across the parking lot to jump in on the last thirty minutes of youth group, where one of them prayed to commission the new class of freshmen guys and another played on the worship team.

And then, they went home to do homework and get ready for school the next day.

All in all, a nice calm relaxing Sabbath. Or not.