Youth Ministry!

One aspect of SPIRITUS this year that I don’t think we have mentioned on the blog yet is youth ministry. We are lucky enough to be able to be a part of the youth ministry program at a local parish here in Menasha, St. Patrick’s. Doing youth ministry at a parish is quite a bit different than the retreat environment that SPIRITUS is used to. With youth ministry, we get to plan events for the youth and instead of just seeing students once on retreat, we get to see the same students over and over again which enables us to build relationships with them. We visit them at faith formation classes, have a drop in for middle schoolers on Fridays after school and other events throughout the weeks. There are three of us on SPIRITUS (Jared, Kate and myself) that make up the youth ministry team and we work together to create fun events for the youth.

This past Friday was one of these fun events. We took about twenty five middle school and high schoolers to Nordic Mountain to go snow tubing. It was a BLAST!! At Nordic, they have a snow tubing hill which has about five different lanes to go down each with numerous miniature hills. The students, as well as us team members, took turns riding down the hill hoping to catch major speed and make it farther down than everyone else. We tried to think of all the sweet ways that we could ride down the hill which included spinning, head first, or trains of people. One time, it was a girls vs. boys train race and, I don’t want to brag or anything, but the girls totally beat the boys! After riding down the hill many, many times we headed over to the pro shop where we enjoyed hot dogs, chips and soda. It was a wonderful experience to do something fun with the students away from the busy routine of life here in Menasha. It was also exciting for the five of us on the team that went because most of us either hadn’t been tubing since we were kids or had never been tubing at all! It was a perfect way to spend my Friday night, spending time with some of the amazing Catholic 

youth from our area!

Here's a picture from the top of the hill!