Love in LoCo

This past week, our multi-area director emailed the staff asking us to prepare a short PowerPoint presentation with pictures, videos, and highlights from the ministry over the past year.  He specified to include details from September 1 through now, but as I didn’t join the staff until December 1, my ministry year was a bit shorter than everyone else’s.  Still, going back through my pictures and videos from huddles, it was so evident how God has been at work in Eastern Loudoun Schools this year.  I went from only knowing students, teachers, and coaches at one school in Loudoun (Potomac Falls, where I taught for the past several years), to now knowing staff and students at seven other high schools and five middle schools.  With all of these schools to visit, several with overlapping huddle times, I am so incredibly grateful for the teachers, parents, and local youth group leaders who so faithfully serve with our ministry each week.  In anticipation of the new middle school opening

Anyone who is familiar with the public schools in Loudoun County knows that May = testing season.  SOLs (the, I think, ironically named VA Standards of Learning tests), Advanced Placement tests, and for many, SAT testing.  This time of year increases the anxiety of students, teachers, and parents alike.  So, I thought it was very fitting that at last Friday’s huddle at Potomac Falls High School, the student leaders chose to show a video from Mike Donehey, the lead singer of Christian band Tenth Avenue North.  It was a teaching video on the band’s song, “I Have This Hope.”  Donehey explains how the hope he and his bandmates have in Christ recently helped them through a difficult time with someone they love and how the song was written as a result of that trial.    He acknowledges that while verses like Isaiah 43:2 are certainly comforting, most of us would rather just avoid passing through the waters or the fire altogether.  The Bible promises us, though, that that's not an opti