The Super Sommer Aktivität!

In August, the Bishop and I had been planning on doing a super activity with the young men where we would go to the banks of the Isar somewhere south of Munich and camp out. Unfortunately, the only week that fit with everyone's schedule was rainy and cold. So we did the next best thing, we had our super activity at the church.

So on a Thursday afternoon in August we gathered at the church house and began our Super Activity. There are four official young men (ages 13, 13, 15, and 17), but we also invited one soon-to-be-young man and a couple of the recently graduated young men to join us. So off and on throughout the evening there were between 7 and 9 of us.

The Super Activity began with a song and prayer and a spiritual message from the Bishop (whose son, Lukas is also a young man). Then the games began...

The first activity for the Super Activity was to be Capture the Flag (or as it turned out, Capture the Boot that Someone Left Next to the Coat Rack).

But before we could play, we had to go over the rules...

In our church building there are four floors all connected by a central staircase and an elevator running up the center of the building. There is also a fire escape staircase from the upper floors to the ground level and including the basement, where the Institute Center is, there are multiple entrances into the building. This made for an interesting playing field where one team had the top two floors and the other team the bottom two. It took a bit of working the kinks out of the rules, but it was fun and intense.

After Capture the Flag, we took a little break and then went to the cultural hall and played good old-fashioned Dodge Ball...

Not sure what Lukas is doing here with his arms...

Here, Estefano suffered from my poor sense of aim...

We cooled off after the game and started on making dinner: homemade pizzas...

My BBQ Bacon pizza was the best ;-)

Not sure why the bishop is scowling...

After cleaning up the kitchen we went downstairs for the Candy Bar Game.

It was a new game for the boys and they had fun with it (btw... you can vaguely see my diagram of the church on the white board from when we were discussing the Capture the Flag rules...)

Junias and Florian had their eyes on the Wunderbar...

Tim wanted the Snickers but the bishop wouldn't give it up without a fight...

Bishop rolls an 11!

After everyone winning a candy bar or two we gathered in one of the classrooms where the bishop had a projector and screen with surround sound set up. We watched Avatar (in 2-D)...

By the time the movie finished it was already past midnight, but we still had some energy left and so we played a few games of hide-and-seek in the church.

Soon it was time for those who wanted to take a rest to rest.

It was already past 2AM but a few of the boys wanted to hear a ghost story or two. The Man of Mt. Kessler made it's German debut.

Some of the boys got creative with where they took their rest...

The bishop and I ended up in separate corners of the primary room on mats (my mat was from one of the pews in the chapel)...

I can't say it was terribly comfortable but I did manage to rest a few hours. At some point in the night I woke up to Lukas and Tim hovering around my sleeping bag chuckling about something, I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly 6AM.

I woke up around 9:30 and found everyone totally knocked out, including Lukas, who, from the looks of it, passed out on a bunch of chairs sometime after 6...

Slowly the bishop and I were able to get everyone awake and moving. Next was breakfast and some of the young men were put on vacuuming duty...

While others were in charge of cooking breakfast: French Toast and Bacon...

The Bishop shot this riveting video of all of us at work. You can tell we were all still a bit tired...

We enjoyed our brunch (it was nearly noon by this time)...

After cleaning up breakfast the bishop did a little slide show of pictures from Young Men activities past and present. We realized that Lukas has worn the same shirt at nearly every activity since the beginning...


December of '08:

April of '09:

July of '09:

April of '10:

July of '10:




and of course for our Super Activity in August:

He's gotten his money's worth out of the thing at any rate.

After the slide show, a few of us played one more game of the Capture the Flag and then it was time to go home. Although camping by the river would have been fun, we made the most out of what we had at the church and had a great time.

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