1. The "Things We Will Never Ever Use in the Video Cafe Ever Again" List
Every youth group learns the hard way that certain games make a mess. After discovering some of these things (such as eggs), a month later forgetting what a mess we made and repeating the process, we finally started to write down a list so we would remember. Just for good measure, we wrote that list down on the floor under the carpet of the new building.
2. 30 Hour Famines
I am not even sure how many of these I have done anymore, but they were always awesome and the most epic kind of overnighter. One year the leaders thought it would be super cool to put all of our students in the video cafe (our multipurpose room) with the lights off and then burst in and silly string them. This was super fun for us, I'm pretty sure the students got tired of it and the ridiculous amount of clean up was how it ended up as the number one spot on our "things we will never ever use in the video cafe ever again" list. One of the Hitchcocks would always be the one with the most sponsorship. This event is when some of the students discovered the "mean Alissa voice". It would come out in the morning, while we were cleaning up before we would break the fast. It was usually directed toward students who were too tired to help clean. Over the years we did a bunch of different service projects, probably played every youth group game known to man, sometimes we slept and sometimes we stayed up all night, we played broom hockey and bigger or better, but the best part of the 30 Hour Famines was the chance to get to hang out with students and become a closer group.
3. Office Russian Roulette
It was like clockwork - every fall we would find ourselves moving office locations within the building. I worked at the church for 3.5 years and in 3 different offices/cubicles. One morning I walked into my shared office with then-youth pastor Adam to find him painting a Texas Longhorns logo on an orange wall. I promptly decided to paint the wall on the other side of the office hot pink. We figured they wouldn't make anyone move into such a unique (read "ugly") office and thus ensure that we would not have to move our office for a while. It was actually a fairly successful tactic.
4. Coffee Spills.
Who hasn't had to hastily grab all their belongings on the floor of the auditorium because they were right in the middle of the coffee river determined to flow straight the the bottom of the stage? There's nothing more unifying than passing around paper towels and a mop to clean a spill that spans from the top row tot he bottom.
5. The Orange Pews
There is not much else in life that I detest more than the orange pews. They were awful. I had dreams about ways to destroy them. Noting good ever came of youth group students sitting on them during group, they were big, always in the way, and they were just ugly.
6. Community
I have been involved in many ministries at LCN as an intern, a staff member and a volunteer. I am thankful for the community God has provided for me at this church, a family away from my family. I am so glad that the church is not about the building but about the people, so I'm excited to see where God takes us in a new location!
