Devin's Home!

Devin came home from his first mission trip Saturday... all smiles! Paige and Juli couldn't wait to hug him as he got off the bus. He's still trying to unwind and process everything he did and witnessed... but he had a great time and is excited about the people he helped while there.

When we first started attending River Oaks, the youth leaders welcomed the kids with open arms. But, there was one man that really just took Devin under his wing and helped him to open his eyes to the Glory and love of God... Doug Todd. Doug has played a huge role in Devin's life over the last year (as well as many other youth members) and we are very thankful for that. Doug wasn't able to attend this mission trip, but was at the church waiting for all the kids to return.

Welcome home, Devin!! We are so very proud of you!

"Take My Life" - message written by Devin

"Take my life, Take my mind,
Take my soul, Take my will,
I am yours now, and I give it all to You"
(Take My Life - Jeremy Camp)

So simple of words. So easily said. So hard to truly do.

How often do we want this? How often do we tell God that we are ready to give it all up? How often are we truly ready?

We sing this song time after time after time. Sometimes we sing just to sing. Sometimes we mean it. But how do we truly mean it? We long for it...yes. But we know it is so hard to truly give up something. We're human...we LOVE control...heck we long for it. We set our whole lives up in order to obtain control of something. But to not only say, but to take the action of giving up TOTAL control in and of our lives by faith... wow.

We all have our little secrets. Things we don't show the rest of the world. But that doesn't mean they're not there. God knows it. ,God knows us. These secrets... we hate them from the bottom of our hearts and our souls... we want them gone because we know they are wrong.. but we will grasp onto them for dear life when they may be taken away. We don't have the will power to give them up. But we need to. Not only for our sake, but by holding onto these things we are giving the devil a foothold and not bringing glory to God.

And there is our answer. God. Only with God can we give these things up. We cannot want to give them up to better ourselves for our own selfish reasons, but only in the realization that this is not bringing glory to God and is in fact bringing poisonous sin upon our lives that gets stronger every day that we are reluctant to release our secrets. Our lives. Our everything.

We need Him. He does not need us. By giving up our lives to him and letting down our guard in order to let Him come into our lives and make a difference, we are as good as dead.

Take my life. It was never our own to begin with. He gave it to us. He gave us the free will to do what we want, thus causing the problems we see in our personal lives and in our society. We can only help ourselves by offering our life to him.

Take my mind. The mind is always flooded with thoughts and images from our environment urging us to sin. We offer our mind up...we offer our sin up. We can be graced to know and embrace the Truth and the peace that comes with it

Take my soul, take my will. Lord save us, save our souls from the eternal hell we are sentenced to because of our sin that only accepting your son, Jesus, can wash away from us. Lord take our will, we are not strong enough on our own...only your strength and grace can lead us the right way and glorify You.

We are yours now. We have always been yours. We will be yours forever.

We give it up to you.

(posted with Devin's permission... he says "I wrote it to be read"...)

A ROCC'in Egg Hunt!

Our church held an Easter Egg Hunt Saturday afternoon. It was a great opportunity to get Jake and Juli and out of the house while their parents got some things organized in the house, and our kids have been looking forward to it all week. So, off we went...

We started in the ROCC (River Oaks Community Church) Gym listening to fun praise music, while the high school youth hid all the eggs. Paige wasn't being too very patient... go figure!

The church drama ministry also did a short musical called "Charity Church Mouse" that they kids really enjoyed! After the end of the show, Paige got to talk to one of the "mice".

The kids all collected eggs and turned them in for goody bags at the end of the afternoon. Believe it or not, Paige ended up with one of the "prize" eggs and got a special treat... despite the look on her face! I was holding her up from hunting the eggs to get a picture, she was NONE too thrilled!

Kudos to Tiffany Singer and all the Youth Leaders at ROCC for organizing a fun afternoon!

Spring ROCC Youth Retreat

Devin and Kayleigh spent the weekend at the high school spring ROCC Youth retreat. This picture says it all! An awesome weekend of fellowship and prayer among the youth of our church.