Sorry to be so complain-y. But it’s been that kind of week.

SUCKY THING THE FIRST

The Hills! It’s so bad this season, y’all. Now I know what you are thinking - it has always been bad. And you are right. But it’s always been more awesomely bad than just bad. Now? Just bad. Boo.

SUCKY THING THE SECOND

Our church meets in an elementary school. (That’s not the sucky part.) We, the youth group, meet in the cafeteria of the school. Recently the school board decided not to let churches use the classrooms anymore. What that means for us is that we have to hand the cafeteria over to the babies and children, leaving us homeless. This Sunday is our last week, and I have exactly five days to figure out a whole new plan for our group. I want to believe that we can move what we do to a weeknight and keep up the amazing momentum we’ve been building. But the truth is, if there’s nothing going on for parents at the same time, it’s hard to get non-driving kids to youth. And that sucks.

SUCKY THING THE THIRD

I wanted to show you guys a picture of my whole family in their matching plaid shorts that Nanny made, but I can’t find it. This is the best I can do (sorry, mom). Please note the matching hats.

SUCKY THING THE FOURTH

One of my most favorite kids is moving. This sucks for more than just the obvious reasons. This is a kid who had a hard time in high school but made it though. A kid with whom I have put in a million hours this summer to get prepared and registered for community college. A kid who is working hard to separate herself from her old life and her old friends and find a new way to live. A kid whose parents gave up parenting her several years ago. And, now, a kid whose dad has recently decided to act the part by issuing her an ultimatum. Whose dad made that decision three days before she was set to begin college, and weeks too late to get her registered where he is. A kid who has a support system for the first time in her life and who now has to start over in a new place. It’s weeks like these that make me wish I had some kind of legal means to make decisions for these kids.

SUCKY THING THE FIFTH

We are out of lime popsicles. I blame Aaron.

Yesterday we took our youth group to Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana. And yes, it is just as awesome as it sounds. I planted myself in the water park and spent the whole day going down giant slides in tubes and playing in the wave pool. It was an excellent day.

On the way home, the kids started casting the movie of our youth group. It’s a stellar cast: Owen and Luke Wilson, Queen Latifah, Micheal Cera, Jessicas Alba, Biel and Simpson, the girl who plays Juno, Dakota Fanning, the Olsen twins, most of the cast of Gossip Girl, the Target lady from SNL and John C. Reilly. You know you want to see it when it comes out.

It took them a while to decide who should play me and Aaron. There was much discussion on all three vans. Here’s what they decided.

The role of Aaron will be played by Seth Rogen. This is because he is cute in a nontraditional way, very funny, slightly inappropriate but good-natured and fun.

The role of Brandi will be played by Lorelai Gilmore. Not Lauren Graham, Lorelai. This is because she understands teenage girls, will tell you when you’re being stupid and talks really fast about books and movies no one else has read or seen.

What do you think? I think they make a pretty good couple. Here they are, making the same faces we usually make while talking to the kids.

It all started a couple of weeks before we left for camp. I got up and began my usual morning house wake up process - opening the doors and blinds, things like that. I looked outside and saw something weird on my car. I went to get it and spent a while finding the perfect place for it. I finally decided that the microwave door was the perfect place to display my first flamingo gift from one of the kids.

Later that week there was a little wrapped package on my desk when I got to work. I opened it up to find the most beautiful necklace in all the land, courtesy of our children’s minister.

Then, the best one. One of my girls went on a cruise to Mexico and came back with my most awesomeest flamingo gift. Not only is it hand-carved and painted, it’s a pen! So fancy. You know you’re jealous.

Three flamingo gifts in two weeks! I am a lucky girl. If I had known doing flamingo fundraiser was going to be so lucrative, I would have done it ages ago. Next year I’m hoping for a flamingo all expenses paid vacation, or maybe a flamingo new car. The possibilities are endless.

Hi friends! I am alive!

The past two weeks have pretty much been a blur. Last Monday at 5:00am we loaded up 32 kids and adults and drove to Ridgecrest, NC for youth camp. It was an amazing week that pretty much stressed out every muscle in my body and every wave in my brain, and I am only now beginning to emerge back into the real world.

Camp was an interesting experience this year. Last year, everything was crazy high energy and emotional and big and loud. And this year… wasn’t. I don’t know if it was the staff, or the schedule, or just excessively high expectations, but everything just felt slower and more mellow.

And it was awesome.

At first the kids were struggling with it. They were expecting the insanity we experienced last year. When they got teambuilding instead of competition and parables and discussion instead of naptime disguised as bible study, they didn’t quite know what to do. But by the end of the week I think they were glad for it. All that intense competition and those big emotional nights are gratifying while they’re happening, but they’re hard to translate into everyday life.

We had several kids who were taking their first trip with our group (and some taking their first non-parent trip EVER), and there’s no better way to get to know people than to ride on a crowded van for 12 hours and sleep in a bed with them. The trick now will be figuring out how to walk alongside all these new relationships and support them when real life claws its way back in.

We made it through 99% of the week injury-free… and ended the week with a midnight dash to the emergency room. The night before we left one of our sixth grade boys got his finger slammed in a heavy door. I will spare you the really gross details and instead tell you that he handled it like a champ and we all survived, even those of us who had to drive home the next morning on three hours sleep.

I love camp so much. I love the crazy games and the morning services and the funny videos and the inside jokes and the late night dance parties and the puff painted tshirts and the teambuilding games and the new people and the bonding and the church group time. I can’t think of much better than to have a job where I get paid to do camp. I would do it for free in a heartbeat.

It’s midnight. I am driving around town with my headlights off and the radio turned down. My car is full of high school kids who are trying, albeit not terribly hard, to keep their voices down. We’re unsure of our destination and are clearly a little bit lost. It’s our fourth night doing this in a row and we’re starting to get the hang of it.

Oh - and there are eighty pink plastic flamingos in the trunk.

These flamingos are taking over my life.

For our big camp fundraiser this year we are flamingoing our church members. It is so much fun. We made videos about the mysterious flocks of flamingos that have been spotted hanging out in the yards of Nashville families and warned the church to be on the lookout.

Every night we move flocks of 20 pink plastic flamingos from yard to yard all over town. The recipients then pay to have them removed and taken to someone else’s yard. So far we’ve flocked 32 families in our church and made enough money to send 11 kids to camp on full scholarships. This is working so well that we don’t have to do the other fundraisers we had planned.

I am exhausted. Exhausted, but very, very happy.

Holy moly, y’all. I am tired. It has been a whirlwind of pictures, tassels, tiny sandwiches, Dr. Suess and Ghandi and Bob Dylan quotes, tiny names in programs and dodging grandparents.

It’s graduation weekend.

We had five seniors in our youth group this year, and they graduated from five different high schools. We’ve sat through a lot of speeches in the last 48 hours.

This is Taylor. He rides his bike all over town and is an amazing rollerblader and has some pretty insane hair.

This is Brandon. He is crazy smart and got a scholarship to attend Columbia.

This is Rachel. She talks more than anyone I have ever known and wants to be a missionary nurse.

This is Dennis. He is going to school on a track scholarship and is the best Guitar Hero player I have ever seen.

This is Sarah. She will tell you exactly how you’re wrong and make you laugh at the same time.

This is a group of kids who barely knew each other a couple of years ago and is walking out of high school as friends. They couldn’t be more different, and they would never have been close if they had gone to school together. It has been so interesting to watch them learn to accept and befriend people who come from such different worlds.

I am so proud and excited for them, and so sad to see them go. They have challenged me and made me think and forced me to open up my mind a little more every day. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

But right now I am going to take a nap. All this celebrating has worn me out.

Have you been watching High School Confidential on WE? I am not kidding, this is the best show on TV. They followed 12 girls for their four years of high school, and each episode focuses on a couple of them and tells their story. It’s just so… real. It’s really moving to watch these freshman girls talk about what they want high school to be and then deal with life when it doesn’t work out that way.

I can’t imagine being 18 (or 27) and watching interviews of myself at 14 talking about all the things I will or won’t do and how things are supposed to be and what life is all about. I would be horrified. I don’t even want to know what I thought six months ago, much less 13 years ago.

It’s almost too difficult for me watch. I just want to reach through the TV and slap some of these parents. Just because she doesn’t speak up about it doesn’t mean your daughter doesn’t want you to work overseas nine months a year. It’s probably not a good idea to marry a guy that you met online two months ago and have only seen in person once. She’s not just joking around when she tries to talk to you about her depression issues. Not talking about things won’t make them go away.

It’s amazing how quickly they suck you in and how involved you feel in their lives. One girl in particular, Jessie, really struck me. She struggled all through high school with pregnancy scares, depression, alcohol, even a miscarriage, but seemed to kind of get it together by the end. She got a scholarship to an arts school in Los Angeles and made plans to move out there after high school. So you get really into her life and are so excited that she’s getting out of Kansas and away from her loser friends. Then they put up a black screen with white text telling you that Jessie had a panic attack a week after she left for California and now works at a Walmart in Kansas City.

GAH. I can’t handle this stuff.

I think we tend to look back on high school through a bit of a fuzzy lens. In hindsight, it’s pretty easy to see that you should have kept playing the violin, or dumped the loser boyfriend, or taken a risk and tried out for the play. But you forget all the stress and agony and drama that went along with all of those decisions, and you want to play down those same feelings in current high school kids.

But that stuff HURTS, y’all. Watching these girls fight with their parents, or get snubbed by their friends, or have a boyfriend leave them… I can still feel it. Sometimes they say something and it immediately takes me back to my bedroom in Mesquite or wherever I was when that stuff happened to me. It sucked then, and it sucks now.

If y’all aren’t watching this show, give it a shot, especially if you’re a girl. And if you know anyone in high school, HUG THEM. They need it. That stuff is so hard.

Because our church meets in an elementary school, our youth group doesn’t really have a mid-week meeting place. We do a lot of stuff during the week, but our big youth meeting is on Sunday mornings during main service. This means that I haven’t been to big church in about a year.

It’s not my favorite thing. I feel pretty disconnected from what’s going on with the church as a whole. I don’t know a lot of people who aren’t in high school or parents of high schoolers. I think people tend to forget about us down in the cafeteria and I have to work really hard to keep them posted about what we’re doing.

As part of our Easter celebrations yesterday, we took the kids to the gym to be a part of the main service. We sat in the chairs with the whole church body, sang with the worship team and listened to the sermon. And I realized something - I don’t really miss it.

Don’t get me wrong. When we have a building and a youth house and two services, we will be able to have a youth hour and all go to main service together. And I am really excited about that. I think the kids will benefit greatly from being a part of the church as a whole and not just the youth group. Our volunteers are truly going above and beyond right now by giving up church for us, and I can’t wait for them to get to do both.

But I realized two things on Sunday morning. One, I have forgotten how to sit still for 45 straight minutes. And two, we’ve really got something special going on down in the cafeteria, and it feels wrong when we aren’t in there. I hate that we didn’t have youth worship yesterday. I really missed sitting down with my junior high girls at our little table and having class. One of my complaints about not going to big church is that we don’t get to see anyone but the kids. But when service was over yesterday, we all gravitated toward each other. We left and I realized that the only people we talked to after church were in high school or the parents of someone in high school. Those are our people.

Last week a friend of ours was fired from his music business job. He and his wife are moving back to Dallas. Aaron and I were talking about what we would do if this new company thing doesn’t work out, if the music thing doesn’t work out. It’s why we live in Nashville. It’s always kind of been understood that we would go where Aaron’s job took us and I would find something when we got there.

But this time it’s different. If Aaron quit working in music, we would probably stay in Nashville. For me. For my job. Our people are here. We love our church so much. I can’t imagine trying to go through the process of looking for a place like GracePointe in another city, even Dallas and it’s thousands of churches. Nashville is our home. GracePointe is our home. And unless Aaron magically gets hired by the Dallas Cowboys, this is where we’ll stay.

One of the kids yesterday said, “It’s nice to be in main service, but it’s like the cafeteria is our home.” And we all kind of laughed about it… it’s an ugly home with a pink and black linoleum floor and long tables stacked up in the corner and crumbs on the floor. It smells like old mashed potatoes and crayons. But it’s where we do what we do. And as excited as I am about the church property and the new building and the youth house, I think we’ll miss it when we’re gone.

The scene: a Starbucks in Franklin, TN, where a youth group is hanging out.
The players: Aaron, a youth leader, and a couple of junior high boys.

JHB1: Hey, Aaron, what kind of music do you like?
Aaron: All kinds of stuff, mostly classic rock and some rap.
JHB1: Do you like Nirvana?
Aaron: Yeah, I like Nirvana.
JHB2: What’s your favorite song?
Aaron: I don’t know… maybe Come As You Are?
JHB1: Mine is Heart-Shaped Box.
JHB2: Yeah! That song is awesome!

Later, after we had successfully convinced these kids that when you go to the bathroom on a plane you have to be careful when you flush or it will suck out your guts, AND that when people go to the bathroom everything just gets flushed out into the air and freezes in the clouds, the conversation continued.

JHB2: Aaron, do you like Rage Against the Machine?
Aaron: Oh yeah, they’re one of my favorite bands.
JHB1: What’s your favorite song?
Aaron: I don’t know, man, I like a lot of their stuff.
JHB1: Mine is Killing In The Name Of.
JHB2: Mine is Bulls on Parade!
Aaron: Those are good songs. Wait a second… do y’all like Weezer? The Foo Fighters?
JHB1: Yeah!
Aaron: I bet I can guess your favorite songs by them.
JHB2: Nuh-uh.
Aaron: Yuh-huh. My Name Is Jonas? Evenflow?
JHB1: Those songs are awesome!
Aaron: Do you know any of their other songs?
JHB1: …
JHB2: YES! But… I can’t think of the names.
JHB1: Yeah, me either.
JHB2: How did you guess those songs?
Aaron: Because you only know the songs that are on GUITAR HERO.

I did three things at work yesterday.

1. Had coffee at Starbucks with the parent of a new kid in our group
2. Had breakfast at Merridee’s (!) with another kid
3. Spent four hours at Chuck E Cheese to say thank you to the junior high kids who help with parking on Sunday mornings.

And that is why my job is better than your job.