A Leadership Challenge and the Search for a Friend

I started a leadership team this year with some of the girls' in my youth group. Ideally, this would be a co-ed group, but I don't have any guys in my youth group that extend beyond crowd kids. So, it's a group of girls. When I was working the other day, I thought, "I've been doing a pretty poor job of working with the leaders in our group." And since, they're all so busy, I decided to start a private fb group and a weekly "leadership challenge" text. This follows on the heals of the what they learned at the leadership retreat this summer.

Well, this week's challenge was a clique buster. Their task was to either sit with or invite someone new to sit with their group at lunch. Sigh. Well, the one girl did it. I'm so proud of her, but apparantly, her other friends were "soo nice" to the boy that he left half-way through lunch. Argh. Frustration. We'll have to talk this out . . . . If they thought the challenge was hard, wait until I tell them they need to apologize to this kid.

So, I wrote about how I needed a friend, and I also am very keen on not challenging my youth group kids to try something that I'm not willing to try, so I thought: "Who the heck am I going to invite to sit with me at lunch?" Haha. But seriously, very rarely do I reach outside of my current circle of friends. I like to think it's because I'm confined to home and don't have access to people, but really, it's probably just because I'd rather not take the effort to make new friends.

So a few weeks ago, this couple showed up at our church, new to the area, she's a SAHM and they have a little boy (about 18 mo.). I started thinking, "Okay, I need to invite her to hang out with me." I was working up the nerve to call her - this afternoon - in the meantime, after teaching (we were out of TP completely) I ran into Kroger (kid free - Allelujia!) and I saw her! Argh. I took it as a sign from God (because I was seriously thinking about her in the parking lot). I was practically falling over myself trying to catch up with them. I was relieved that the box of tea I needed was in the aisle they were in. So I strolled over, casually, of course, and said, "Hey guys!" I made sure that I grabbed the box of tea from the shelf, so they didn't think I was tracking them down. Haha! We stood there and talked for 5 minutes or so, and I told her about how I was planning on going home to check the weather and see if there would be a good day to meet at the park to play. She seemed agreeable; although, my insecure part makes me feel like she thinks I'm nuts. Sigh . . . after reading this, maybe I am! To be continued . . .