So, this is probably obvious from some of my recent posts, but I had a pretty challenging group this week. I'm glad they came because I think it was good for them even if a lot of them don't realize it right now, but it also was good for me. One example of this is when God used the worst day of my week to remind me He still had my back.
The backstory: my group got kicked out of our summer camp anchor site on Wednesday. The incident itself wasn't a huge deal--a male student said some stuff about eating poop to one of the little girls (you know, usual boy hijinks)--but she went home and told her mother, who freaked out and called a bunch of people. We got it settled, apologies and lessons learned all around, but the camp directors decided it would be best for the group to just not come back for the rest of the week.
That really messed up our schedule, as you can imagine. We were supposed to spend every afternoon there and Kyle, who does the schedules, had to shuffle a bunch of stuff. Considering my group's attitude up until that point, I was pretty happy with how well they rolled with everything. But one thing we had to do was move our Urban Plunge to the afternoon instead of the morning it was originally scheduled for...
Which turned into my group leader confronting me at breakfast, confirming that we were no longer going to our ethnic restaurant for the evening (part of the Plunge is buying dinner for your group and someone on the street with $2/person), and then freaking out at me. "That is completely unacceptable," "I know you can't do anything about it now, but you need to let the higher ups know I am extremely unhappy," and "I don't need to starve to understand homelessness," were among the choice quotes of the morning. All this when she had known how the Plunge worked for months, ever since the pre-visit, and had been telling the kids about it since Sunday, which is technically against the rules, so they had plenty of warning. I had to walk away in the end. It was pre-coffee, you know, and I was up late with a flat tire incident the night before so I had a really difficult time keeping my cool.
Anyway, our solution, since we'd had so much trouble already with the group, was to plan on going to our restaurant anyway if the group didn't get enough to eat. That appeased the leader, but I knew we weren't going to actually have time to do that afterward, especially considering how slowly the group moved. So I was dreading the end of the Plunge. But when the first half of the group returned--the half with the leader who was being more reasonable that day--I discovered a free cookout had cropped up on the church's front steps, and they offered us hot dogs and hamburgers. Naturally, my nine boys hadn't really eaten. They were 7-Eleven addicts so I had been kind of worried about their ability to think outside the orange-and-green box, if you know what I mean.
But, yeah. Free cookout, almost literally manna from heaven. Problem solved. God = awesome. My group even had time to shower. I'm pretty sure half of them still went to 7-Eleven after I pointed them to the free food, but I'd done my part and, even better, my coworker Kelsey made me veggie stir-fry for dinner and I don't think I'd seen a proper vegetable in five days.
It was a pretty awful day, but in the end it was a really encouraging one.
And tomorrow is another group.
Yesssssssss
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