My Greatest Summertime Memories...

Okay, here is my list of favorite summertime memories. I figured I will give you my list and then you can give me yours. We can compare notes and decide who has had the best summers so far. I will try to keep it fair and limit it to jr. high and high school memories since I have had so many more summers than all of y'all. So here it goes...my top 5 favorite jr. high and high school memories:

5. Schlitterbaghn 1998: My friends dared me to get inside of all of their tubes and let them role me down a huge hill right by a line of people waiting to get on the Hillside ride. I did it and it was a blast...well at least it was until I couldn't stop and I ran into a bunch of people. Good times.

4. Great Adventure 1996: The first bootcamp ever, we are in Waco and we are riding to go to a housing project to run a BYBC there. That year someone thought it was a good idea to use puppets in our gospel presentation. While doing the gospel presentation the kids stole our puppets in the middle of our presentation right off of our hands and then stole our puppet screen. While we were chasing them to get our stuff back they used our puppets to cuss us out. Nothing like a cussing puppet and a little adversity to make a great summer time memory.

3. Summer 1996: Ryan and I are bored and poor. All we have is a dollar between the booth of us, and thus the dollar game is born. We gallivant all over town placing that dollar in the weirdest places just to see what people will do to try to get it. Absolutely one of the greatest days of my life.

2. Summer 1999: On a missions trip to Mexico me and a couple of friends find a pool in the the middle in the poorest area of Juarez Mexico. The pool is packed with kids, like sardines in a can, we invite all of them to play soccer or "futbol" with us the next day and they say they will. We run back to our Pastor, Bobby, and tell him we need to put together a soccer tournament. We buy chalk and soccer balls and food and water and we line a giant field to make 5 soccer fields. The next day 150 people ages 8-20 show up for what turns out to be one of the coolest impromptu soccer tournaments ever. In the middle of it we sit everyone down and share the gospel. Over 40 put their faith in Christ. That was an amazing day.

1. Summer 1995: The first Great Adventure. I began to hangout with Ryan, I began to really fall in love with God as I served Him and I had a blast. In the first Great Adventure there were about 25-30 of us. We had all of our training at a families house that had kids in the group and a pool. Our whole group hung out together all summer long. The guys sang songs to the girls and the girls wrote the guys notes. The leaders had us play follow the leader to learn what it means to lead and to follow. Looking back at it all it was so goofy, yet it was awesome. That summer I got the opportunity to lead a couple of kids to the Lord. That was the coolest. Ever since then I have never missed a Great Adventure.

So that is my list of top 5 moments. And I have to say that I am pretty excited about this summer. I think it might top some of mine. But send me yours and we will see if you have already had some summers that top mine.

Jake