A Wandering Spirit: Fun in the Son

This past week I went to my first ever Fun in the Son retreat held at South Padre Island, Texas. the Bahia Mar in South Padre Island, Texas. For those of you who have never been to a Fun in the Son, try to picture a Montreat youth conference being held at the beach (well there are some pretty big differences in how the program is structured, but the basic idea is the same - lots of youth, worship, small groups, family time, etc). I loved going to Montreat conferences, and I loved my week at Fun in the Son.

This is a view from our balcony at the Bahia Mar.

And it's a very long story, but every time Rob has gone to Fun in the Son in the past, they've always chosen to dress up (the leadership) each year. Well have to some brainstorming, I remembered that it was the 50th year anniversary of the smurfs. Instead of going all blue, however, we decided to capitalize on the fact that Rob already owns multiple pairs of bright green pants. Stacy and I did color our hair blue (with something that rinses out in 5-10 washes). I'll spare you more details about our outfits, because you can just see the picture below - but it did make it very easy for our youth to find us in the midst of a crowd of people.

We each selected a different smurf to be. Rob was Papa smurf. Stacy was Sassette (and yes, that's a real smurf - but she was only in 3 or so episodes).

And I was smurfette.

This is our whole group on our first night of the conference, just before worship began.

One of the big things we did every day was worship (a morning session and an evening session). There were two different groups that led the music part of the worship, Jon Abel and Jason Johnson.

This is Jason Johnson leading worship one day (so I must admit that all the lights make it look more like a show than worship).

This is Rachel with Jon Abel.

And while various people were getting the two artists to sign things, Jason Johnson joined in on the fun and had Jon Abel sign his guitar pick.

This is Jason Johnson with Rachel and Austin.

There were also two different speakers. Jim, from Maze Ministries was with us in the morning.
Jim is an illusionist (kind of a magician) and he used his talents to communicate truths about Christianity. I was truly amazed about some of the things he did, and have absolutely no idea how he did it. Austin was able to be one of his helpers one day. On that day (I'll try to explain this as quickly as possible while still making sense) he had three volunteers on stage. One girl was holding a rolled piece of paper with a phone number on it (but no one could see the phone number). Another girl randomly picked a phone number from a phone book, and read it aloud to Austin who wrote it down on a piece of paper.

They then checked it with the other number (that had been written before the show even began), but they didn't match. Jim made i seem like a mistake, and that the trick hadn't worked - but then he took the table cloth off the table they had been working on and there in big writing was the right phone number that did match the one Austin had just written down. Ok, I don't know if that made any sense - but if you were there it was quite impressive.

And in the evening Kenn Kington was with us as our speaker. He's a comedian, and he too used his talents to communicate truths about the Christian gospel. He came over and did "family time" with our group one evening. This is our group with Kenn at the end of our time together.

Another part of the day was recreation. Each day, we had a good chunk of the afternoon free, and with the exception of Wed (when we had the whole afternoon free) there were planned events.

Monday was the volleyball tournament (and we actually did pretty well in that one).

Tuesday was the basketball tournament (and we didn't do all that well - but the team we lost to ended up winning the entire thing, which did make me feel a little better).

There was a chess/checkers tournament (Alex represented us there).

And of course, dodge ball. This was our dodge ball team.

And the team from Midland, TX,

and the team from Oklahoma (who had beaten us in basketball).

Getting ready for our game to begin

And in addition to the planned activities and sports, there was just a lot of time for random fun. Monday night there was a luau (I'm not sure who the girl is in this picture, but she matched Rob -so we took a picture)

Stacy and I all geared up for the Luau.

Wed afternoon when we had the day free, Stacy took the youth on a dolphin tour (Rob and I unfortunately had a lunch meeting to go to and so we missed the dolphin tour).

These next two pictures are just a few random shots we took on our last day. There was this pink structure outside of the convention center where we had all of our meetings. We talked all week about taking a group picture there. That never happened, but we did take a few pictures in it.

On the way back, our group briefly split up. Rob continued on in the van to Arlington. Stacy and I detoured through San Antonio. First we had to drop off a few of the youth who actually, do some pick-ups, and then head back to Arlington. I stopped by Sharon and Brian's house for a few minutes to pick something up from them, and I think they were very entertained by my hair color. Even though we only stayed for a few minutes, the house they are building is almost complete - so I got to see the almost finished project.

I have heard so many good things about Salt Lick, it's a BBQ restaurant outside of Austin. And when I realized that we would be right in Austin around dinner time we decided to stop at Salt Lick. And it was soo good - there are other good BBQ places, but Salt Lick was especially good.

Taylor and Cameron enjoyed it too