Small Victory

At around 4:40pm this afternoon, after several days and weeks of plugging away on my youth ministry plans for the fall, I added the last touches to my schedule. Finally, finally, I have game ideas, activities, discussion ideas, icebreakers and handouts lined up for every single topic.

A small victory, but it did feel good to finalize things a little bit.

Of course, I will need to chat with each of the five guest speakers I have lined up to ensure I know what to expect. Some I expect will easily fill the two hours on their own without much input from me outside of an icebreaker for their benefit, but two in particular will certainly need some prompting and prodding to keep the ball rolling. I have lots of backup plans for those two, and I did a lot less planning for the speakers I know will have fun planning and no problem filling the time with my kids.

Now, knowing the way I work, even during the weeks when I'm on my own, a lot of things will change on my schedule as the year goes on. I always look at my plans in the weeks immediately leading up to the meetings and figure out what will work and what will not as best as I can. There's always things here and there that fall completely flat which you can't predict in advance, but generally, I'm getting better at spotting what's a dud in advance so I don't walk into disasters.

Last year I was a bit of an idealist in my planning and several things I had planned would not work with the particular group of kids I have. In my defense, I didn't know the kids last year. This year I have the advantage of knowing all of them. Despite that, I'm sure I will find a few of those ideas when I get ready to implement these plans in the fall where I truly wonder: "What was I thinking?!" but hopefully, almost a year and a half into this, I'm a little more knowledgeable and a little less naive and things will more often work than not.

My other big project for the summer, besides the pandemic planning, has been working on a course on Vatican II. I have the course outline done and much of the research -- well, refreshment on the research, since I took a course on Vatican II between Sept - Dec 2005, and it's been a while since then. So, now the youth plans are essentially ready to implement, I want to do the same for my Vatican II course with handouts and the like as much as I can so they're ready to go before September too. I have only five - 5! - full, uninterrupted days left in the office before I'm on holidays again, so time is not on my side, but I am hopeful I will be in really good shape by the time September rolls around.