What's Your Vice?

By Heather (Balance with Purpose)

The youth at my church planned and participated in the H2O project the past two weeks. Everyone in the congregation and others that were reached in the community were challenged by our youth to give up all beverages except water for two weeks. Whatever money they would have spent on sodas, coffee, milk, etc. was to be donated to the H2O project to help people in a country without clean water to drink.

My friend (we’ll call her Mary) told me during dinner at church Wednesday night that she would be writing a hefty check on behalf of her and her son for the H2O project. They did their best to drink water for the two weeks, cheating only twice, and kept track of how many times they passed on buying a Starbucks drink or soda.

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Youth "Get It" ~ Responding With Their Hearts

By Chuck (Sharing Compassion)

The past two weekends I had the privilege to represent Compassion at Youth Encounter's Quake Conference in Hunt Valley, MD.  This was a new partnership for Compassion and my involvement is interesting. We had signed up last fall to work the table for sponsorships. Late last year the event dropped off our list of events to work and it was explained to us that they would be doing their own staffing due to the long periods of downtime. With my job situation I felt that it was for the best as I did not know what my schedule would be. Fast forward to the second week of January and I got a call from Colorado asking if I would be willing to do the event. They actually wanted someone who would be willing to work the table for the weekend and if I wanted to then perhaps be available to speak to the youth.  Still not employed I certainly had the time and those that know me know I would never pass up a chance to speak on behalf of Compassion.

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One Word At A Time: Peace

By MAD21

Peace means many things to many people. Wikipedia has a lot of information about where the word came from and what it means stating in its first sentence: "Peace is a quality describing a society or a relationship that is operating harmoniously. This is commonly understood as the absence of hostility..." If you Google it, the first things you'll see are images of a peace sign, and links to the definition; the Peace Corps.; Peace Quotes; and the Nobel Peace Prize to name a few.

The world would have us think that peace is when everything is going our way, but I have to wonder if what they really mean is you can have peace so long as you do as you like and no one or nothing interferes. We all know that couldn't happen for everyone, so does that mean we can't all have peace? I don't believe it. But then, what does peace really mean?

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Contentment

By Peter (Rediscovering the Church)

They say that love is blind – and when we marry, the blindness and excitement of new love can blinker us to the point that we think of our spouses in unrealistic terms.

Husbands look like hunky movie stars, wives like supermodels. We feel lucky to have found them.

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Life Is Funny: Something In Between

By MAD21

As a stay-at-home-mom of young children, I see (or hear) a lot of cartoons and children's shows. Not that there is a whole lot to watch on TV anyway. We have a few shows that we TIVO and watch after our girls have gone to bed, but for the most part, I don't watch much TV.

We had some down time this afternoon after a busy morning/early afternoon. We had sent the girls into rest-time.

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