Emily belongs to a small group of about a dozen young people who are working their way through The Truth Project this year under the guidance of a a mom & dad who have an amazing heart for young people. We’re so thankful that Emily was asked to be part of such an awesome group! Thanks, Scott & Jill, for organizing this!

The group meets approximately four times a month – once to watch the Truth Project video lesson and once to discuss it. They also meet once to participate in a serving project of some sort and once for a social activity. Each of the kids in the group is responsible for organizing one serving project and one social activity throughout the year.

Serving projects so far have included: putting on a VBS this past summer and a Harvest Party & Hayride this past fall for kids in an under resourced area of town, sorting packages of garden seeds to send to a third world country through Vision Beyond Borders which was an ALL DAY project sorting thousands of seed packets, and sending love packages of clothes and toys through the same organization.

In addition to the above serving projects, the group has also decided to pool their funds together to sponsor two children this year. The first child is an eight year old girl from Thailand named Saowanee who they are sponsoring through Compassion International and the second one is an eleven year old girl from Nepal named Sunita who they are sponsoring through Vision Beyond Borders. I’m particularly drawn to Sunita because we have friends who were missionaries to Nepal for a number of years and they adopted a child from the same town where Sunita resides.

The group’s social activities so far have included:

*a fun night in the park where they played all sorts of games including one which was a camera treasure hunt where they had a list of things that they needed to go find and take pictures of. They also had a food relay which Emily won – using only her mouth she had to make a heart shape out of a HUGE pan of red jello.

*an impromptu night time sledding adventure the only time we’ve had snow so far this winter – the night before Thanksgiving. Here are a few pictures from that activty. The first one here is of Josh and his friend (both wearing blue coats)

The sledding took place on private property which has a VERY LONG hill for sledding. There was a fire at the top and bottom so everyone had a chance to get warmed up. Did I mention it was FREEZING that night?

Here is our Emily (on the right) and her friend, Emiliee, who is also part of the Truth Project group.

I’m not sure how many kids ended up coming, but I would guess there were close to a hundred. It seems that it just sort of “snowballed” with everyone inviting friends! HEY…. it’s not very often we get enough snow to actual go sledding. It didn’t matter that it was the night before Thanksgiving. If there is SNOW, we’re going sledding. FYI, we haven’t had any measureable snow since then either.

The hill is SO LONG that Scott & Jill lined up a few of us to haul the kids back up the hill. We did this for a SOLID 3 hours – up and down and up and down with no breaks at all. And the line of kids stretched FOREVER… you can sort of see the long line in the picture above and below you can see a pile of kids loaded into the back of our pickup.

*an evening of card games and Ultimate frisbee (sorry no pictures)

Emily was scheduled to organize the serving and social activites for December which she decided to combine into the same evening since December is so busy for everyone. The evening started with a chili dinner at our house (see picture at the top of this post) followed by the serving part of the night which was to go on a hayride Christmas caroling throughout our neighborhood and passing out candy canes with the Legend of the Candy cane attached.