Impact 2011 - Belgium Youth Retreat

In my previous post I said we've been busy, busy, busy.  One of the things in our lives that kept us a little extra busy was planning for and participating in Impact 2011.  This was a retreat for youth put on my the International Baptist Churches in Europe.  We attend one of those churches and attended a different one when we lived up in Ramstein.  We've kept in touch with our friend Jan Horak, who is the youth pastor at Faith Baptist in Ramstein so this is how we got roped into helping...just kidding...we were invited to help and loved helping!  Unfortunately, I was just getting over being sick with bronchitis and Tom was just getting sick when we were leaving.  So the whole weekend Tom wasn't feeling real well, so he didn't have as much fun as he could have, had he been well.  So Tom was in charge of the recreation time (games) and I was in charge of the food (for about 100 people).  There were many challenges during the weekend, but we did our best and came out happy to have gotten to enjoy the time away in Belgium in spite of the challenges.

Some of the highlights of the weekend...
-Gregory got to pretend to be a teenager for the weekend :-)
-Joshua got to hang out with mom A LOT in the kitchen
-Joshua also got to help make 7 cakes and 6 pans of bars before we left for Belgium
-Gregory got to help peel 48 apples for some of the applesauce we made at home to take to Belgium
-Got to see an old friend from a retreat about 4 years ago...when we had the same speaker
-Got to make new friends - had wonderful people to help in the kitchen (about 6 adults)
-Got to stay in an OLD Chateau...it was so crazy and beautiful there!
-Like I said Tom was sick, but he enjoyed using a megaphone, especially since he was so hoarse.
-Most importantly 8 youth committed their lives to Jesus Christ!

To see more pictures, go to our shutterfly website and to see even more pictures, listen to some of the messages and read some of the youth comments go to these websites:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/IBC-Youth-Impact-Fall-Retreat/199974680079930
https://www.facebook.com/events/179351518814328/
http://tomandroxannecook.shutterfly.com/