What a week

Well this week has been eventful to say the least. Shasta and I helped our friend Pastor Billy from Fellowship Bible Church out at their Summer Break this year. Summer Break is a week long event that is essentially a vacation bible school for teens. There was games, food, music and great teaching every evening. Shasta and I served as team leads for what I think was the smallest team there. It was a real challenge for our team to compete and score points in the games challenges but they more than made up for it by memorizing their verses and just gutting it out all. Props to Melissa who was one of only 3 attendees who memorized every verse (15 total) this week. For the first 4 days our team was either 7th or 8th of the 8 teams there and it was an inspiration to me to watch them continue to go full steam even against teams that in some case had twice as many members. Well when the final points were totalled, we were suprised to find that it was based on the average per team member and not total points. Our team ended up third overall but more importantly we had a great time and grew in the word!!!

Thursday night we decided to go catch the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight with several of the teens from our youth group. First of all, the movie very much deserves it's PG-13 rating. It is however an incredible movie, Heath Ledger's performance as Joker will be talked about for years to come. In my opinion his performance was a actually a bit tame compared to previous versions of the Joker, which is exactly what it needed. It would have been very easy for him to carbon copy Caesar Romero or Jack Nicholson's performances but he takes the character to a new place and pulls it off spectacularly. Christian Bale is just about perfect as Bruce Wayne/Batman. His understated performance as a conflicted, reluctant superhero will be overshadowed by Ledger's but is no less dynamic and the film would not have been nearly as good with out it. We got home at 3:30 am and I was up and working by 8:50. Lunch brought a 90 minute nap and with the help of 5 hour energy I made it through the last night of Summer Break.