A Challenging Time?
Abby Parsons reports on an adventure weekend away

Recently, a group of friends and I went on an adventure weekend called Challenge. It was run by youth workers from Tavistock, Martin and Tim. It took place at Runnage Farm in Postbridge. Here the youth from various churches in the Tavistock area met together. We were put into three teams of five.

As this weekend was all about facing challenges, there was one main challenge that ran throughout the whole weekend. This was to learn everyone’s full name, (including middle name) date of birth, shoe size and the colour of their toothbrush. When we were told this on Friday evening, it seemed like an impossible task as there was 17 people who went on the camp! Luckily, we only had to learn one team at a time, starting with our own team.

Other challenges that we faced included building rafts that actually floated, finding a way to cross the stream when we were stuck in a field full of cows and getting up in the morning to go into a freezing cold shower room with a concrete floor!

Every evening we had a time of worship and a teaching session. These were lead by different people each night, which made it very interesting. On Sunday a man called Ned came and told us about how much god loves us. He loves us so much that He died for us and He is bubbling over with excitement to tell us how deeply He loves us.

In the afternoons we had team time, where we could discuss the teachings. We talked about what really stood out to us in the teachings, or any difficulties we had in understanding them. We also prayed for each other about the challenges we are facing in our lives right now.

In our free time we built a den in the forest made out of branches and moss. We also made up songs about a twisted stick we took absolutely everywhere (named Alowicious), a twig that looked the same, but smaller (called Miniwicious) and a squashed spider in my maths book (called Pasquicious)! Don’t ask!

At the end of the weekend, all three teams were neck and neck, with a total of 520 points. The deciding vote was a round of 'paper, scissors, stones', which was won by the 'Mad Banana Zip Up Monsters'! Well done!

We had our own version of the Oscars, which was great fun! There were many awards, such as the cleanest person, which was won by Jo, who was the first to get up and have a shower every morning! I don’t know how she does it! Justin was nominated for almost every single Oscar, including quietest person and noisiest person! I got an award for the most annoying phrase. (“How rude” - this was banned for the weekend as I couldn’t stop saying it!) It was an excellent action packed weekend and I enjoyed every bit of it. There wasn’t one person that didn’t have a fantastic time! I think everyone went home feeling that they had moved closer to God, I certainly felt that way. It was an experience of a lifetime and I will never forget it! (Especially Briony and Lizzie's….er…..how can I put this….interesting rendition of “My heart will go on” on the Karaoke machine!)

Abby

1st February 2002 @ King's           Review by Martin Snell

On Fri Feb 1st Kings was close to packed. We had people arriving from Looe, Plymouth, Exeter and as far south as Falmouth. It was something special! Kings had two- yes, two! Christian rock bands come in for a gig. You may think that all Christian music has to be played on an organ and sung by a choir but not with these guys. The bands were called ’Kindle’ and ’KATO’, the people that came to the gig had a fantastic time. From 8pm through to 10pm the crowd were bouncing, cheering and generally having a jolly good time! Both bands had a really strong set and we heard absolutely no complaints about the quality of the music. The gig was actually part of a UK tour for the bands and they chose to come to Tavy as a venue over the choices of Plymouth and Okehampton.

 

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