This past weekend was what we call a “Kickstart” weekend for the youth activities in Belgium and the Netherlands. After the summer camps and school starting, the young people look forward to seeing their friends again. This past weekend was organized by the church in Maastricht - our congregation. But since we don’t have a building that can really be used for something like this we used our homes - it was kind of scary, but great!
Our house and the Kok family’s house are on the same street in the little village in Belgium where we live. So we planned to have the girls down at the Kok’s while the boys would stay with us. No problem as long as we were counting on 20 young people at the most. When more than 30 showed up, we wondered how everything would work out. But everyone was very flexible and it all worked out great.
On Saturday we headed out to an open air museum where we learned about how life was 100 years ago - from actors who played the part in villages set up in that time period. It was great to see and hear what it must have been like. And it got us all thinking - our theme for the weekend was: “Jesus: Now!?” We wanted to look at what Jesus would look like today. Can we still follow his ideas and teachings? Or is it all just out of date?
Besides the teaching and thinking it was just great to be able to see friends again from the summer. As some of the young people put it, “I don’t know what I would do if we didn’t have these weekends! Chatting just isn’t enough. It is so good to be able to see each other again.” We have already had several questions about when the next weekend is planned. What a great opportuntiy to see how important we are to one another.
