Not so little anymore

I've been thinking the last couple of days about some things pertaining to my youth group. No, I'm not gonna start complaining. I've got nothing to complain about about them. I love my youth group and I always have. I'm not letting Satan get to me.

I realized two things last night. The church I go to in my town has been around for about 13 years. We just finished paying off our building's short term debt this past summer. Pretty amazing stuff. That's not exactly what I realized though. I realized that I've been in youth group for about 9 years.

How can that be? That would mean that I'm either older than I say I am or I was 9 years old when I was in youth group. It's the second one. The kids I grew up with in youth group, the older ones anyways, we've always been together. We did participate in children's church, but we were never really in the kids Sunday school class. We always had our own group. Some of them have been together even longer. I came in when the church was probably 4 years old (that's really young when I think about it now). My pastor and I were talking last week at my piano lesson about the fact that he has known a few of us for about 12 years. That's about as long as the church has existed in my town. That's really cool.

The second thing I realized was that my youth group is no longer small. I realized this looking at my old youth pastor's newest youth group. From the picture, I saw 9 teens. There might be more though. It was the only picture I saw of them though. At that, I thought, hey my youth group has 9 kids too. But wait a minute, no we don't anymore.

The youth group started with about 3 or 4 kids. I got thrown in there at some point and then so did my friend Becky and her brother JJ who is our current sorta youth leader. When Matt and Lindsay were here, we had about 9 or 10 teens. After they left, we grew some more. I realized last night that we've almost doubled over the past year. That's crazy!

I can't call my youth group little anymore. I can't really call my church little anymore. My church is in the middle it seems. We're too young to be called old, but too old to be marked as a new church. I guess we're a teenage church.

That's so cool!