Getting together with our Teens for a film night.

Adie and I have been wanting to do something special with our teens for sometime now. We decided to have a film night at our house. We opted to do this rather then have it at the church because culture here would allow just anyone who is passing by to stop in and join in on the festivities. The point of our little celebration was to reward our faithful young people and give us an opportunity to get to know them better.

Our place is quite far, in Togolese standars from the church. It would take about 90 minutes to 2 hours to walk to our house from the church. So, the trip isn't taken too often by many of our members to come out and visit us. However, we still planned to have it at our place despite the distance because we would have more privacy and the simple fact that the Togolese love to “visit” your house. I'm not to sure what significance it has but they still love “to know” where you live.

So, Saturday night we challenged all who had bikes to ride them out to the house. That was about five of the eventual 26 that would make it. Another guy road a motorcycle, a few walked from near by and 17 of us crammed into my poor little vehicle that at max. should only hold about 10!

We decided that the night would be light so we showed a film called The Polar Express. The kids loved the festive film. During that film, the feasted on Koolaide, Popcorn and homemade cookies. All of these things are a special treat for them. Sugar is expensive and they don't often get a lot of it. And for the film, most don't have radio's at their house yet alone t.v.'s or electricity. So to come to our place and get to watch a film outside was a very neat thing for them.

It was so great to have them. They all had such a terrific time as did Adie and I. We took about ten minutes at the end and just encouraged them reminding them that they are the future of our church. There is an expression in French “soit fidéle”. The idea is that you would long to be faithful. I attempeted to challenge them to be faithful to God, to the Word of God and towards the goal of growing in their faith. We have such an amazing group of young people. I am really excited to see what God will be doing in this church over the next 5-10 years!