Sunday, November 22, 2009

Being served, or serving... decisions decisions....

Tonight I came to the realization that I have overbooked myself... I was sitting at Bible study with some friends from both St. Charles and St. Paul's. My friends from St. Charles were inviting those from St. Paul's to help out the the youth group. It was when they told them the date of the retreat that I realized that I promised to be part of two different retreats that happen to be over the same week-end. How I did that, I have no idea. As soon as I made that connection and reacted to it was when both groups of my friends all of a sudden kind of fought over which retreat they thought I should go on. I felt like a rope in the middle of a tug-of-war game. It was not too much fun.

You see with one retreat I would be chaperoning and the other I would actually just be attending. I guess it comes down to me serving other people's needs and helping feed their relationship with Christ, or being somewhat selfish and focusing on my own relationship with Christ. I know whichever one I attend I will get something out of it, but I also realized that I am going to be disappointing someone over which one I choose to attend.

I feel as though I am always on the go and ready to help lead retreats for high schoolers. I love to do it, it's not that I don't. I was just kind of looking forward to sitting back and going on the ride and not worry about what needs to be done or how my talk will go over or making sure that everyone gets something out of the retreat. I kind of want to be the one worried about for a change of pace, but I know it is selfish when I could be out there helping bring someone closer to God. I know that there will be one other girl chaperone on the youthgroup retreat, so it is not as though my presence is really needed for the girls to be able to attend, but the girl chaperoning it, I can tell, really does not want to be the only girl doing that.

It would be me that ends up worrying over retreats... A friend of mine, after hearing my little predicament, looked at me and told me I should become a youth minister. I kind of laughed at her because I am quite happy working where I am, but she is onto something. I do love helping out with the youth and putting on retreats and chaperoning for retreats. I love it so much. It's what I do with the little free-time I have. Infact, that was a contender when it came to me deciding what my major would be for college. There's just something special about working with high schoolers when it comes to their Catholic faith. I guess there could be way worse things I could worry about than which retreat to attend, but for me this is not an easy choice to make. I figure I need to pray about where God wants me to be, and that's where I will go.

2 comments:

Mike Keucher said...

You must go to the St. Charles one! I don't see what the difficulty is here!! "JK", but I do think they'd benefit from having you there.

Teresa said...

See, Mike... This is why I didn't go to you for advice first... I'd knew you'd have biased opinion.... lol. :)

Teresa