Evendays

Last week we had 11 students for the Thursday night dinner. The meal was fabulous and everybody ate everything but for a few potatoes. The great dessert (brownies, vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce) got vaporized in nano-seconds. 
Our question this week was easy, one that a last year’s student sent to me: What’s a Halloween [...]

27 youth came together in rain-drenched Ardèche, France for a three night and all the days between retreat during the All Saints Weekend. French teens get a couple weeks off at this time of the year, and the Swiss kids ditch a day of school to participate.
The weather was terrible. 6 inches of snow at [...]

I’m off to the French Ascension (yes, Thursday is Ascension) Retreat in the Ardèche region. I’ve only got a teen class and a pre-teen class to prepare, along with KP and other duties. 
The teen class is on The Body of Christ, which leads me to John Michael Talbot’s melody of Teresa of Avila’s prayer:
Christ has [...]

On Tuesday evening, Wife, Daughter and I were heading home from the Marseilles Chorale concert in Geneva when the 10:30 PM news came on the radio. The reporter announced the arrest earlier in the day of a senior from Daughter’s High School at Daughter’s High School. The young man was pocketing a loaded pistol, along [...]

There has been a garbage strike going on in Naples for months. Seems that the Mafia controls the garbage pickup and disposal, and they decided to flex their muscles. There is garbage everywhere, stacked up on every other corner. Plastic bags float in the wind. Gulls and dogs nip at the garbage.
But the 14 youth [...]

The armistice began at 11 AM, Paris time, on 11.11.1918.
As of yesterday, there were but 2 French veterans of that war who were still alive. During the war itself there were around 8,500,000 military deaths. During the war, the French suffered a 75% casualty rate (1.3 million dead. 4.2 million wounded.)–We had 6 youth [...]

Daughter, Wife and I got back home from the Annual 4 day Teen Retreat last night after a 5 hour drive. It’s something I organize each year, a retreat I inherited from two great, older guys who were looking for a naïve "young" man who would carry on the tradition. 12 years ago I had [...]

When we first got to Switzerland we were young, energetic, and full of good ideas. (Now we are less young, still energetic, yet looking for new ideas!)
Wife went to the nearby retirement home (Bethanie) and asked if she could adopt some residents. Just visits and such, but the organization was very suspicious. After a bit, [...]

How do you tell if you had a great teenage weekend retreat or not?

You could count the number of wounded (one broken arm, one foot in the eye).
How ‘bout the number of conversions? (0 and still counting).
Maybe the hours of sleep you got per 24h? (outside of the Bible studies, about 6.5 hours). [...]

It’s time for our yearly All Saints Teenage Retreat in beautiful Ardêche, France. Even though it’s not quite All Saints Day and even though I’m not a teenager, we’ll be attending for the 15th time. This is only my ninth time to direct it. And there is a great group of workers who support this [...]