Living Like a Hero This Weekend

I'm nearly finished putting together my topics for this weekend's Youth Retreat. I've been having a lot of fun working on this and I hope everyone enjoys it and gets something out of it :)

When I was asked to do the retreat, to be honest, I was going to say no... but when I was asked to do comic book themed messages... well... I had to jump at that chance.

A number of years ago I had read the book Who Needs a Superhero? by H. Michael Brewer. I loved that book and always thought that it would make a great sermon series. So this retreat was a great opportunity to give that a shot. I'm calling the series Living Like a Hero!

I used the main themes from the books... and we'll be using some of the study questions to get the kids more involved with each session. It was hard to only pick 4 comic heroes to talk about since the book covers so many different great idea. In the end I picked four of my favorite Marvel comic characters, The Hulk, Iron Man, Spider-Man and the X-Men. And the fact that they each have some pretty cool movies (except the Hulk but thankfully a new version is coming out this summer!) made it more likely that these kids who probably have never picked up a comic book will know the characters because of the films.

So, with 3 sessions completely finished, I'm plugging away today on the last one, the X-Men. I already have all the information gathered... it's just time to clean up the notes and put it all together. Hopefully I'll be done by lunch and then I can go over each one and do some last minute cleaning up tomorrow.

I'm the type of guy who loves trying something completely new and see how God will stretch me in the experience. Doing a youth retreat is definitely new! I'm really excited about this opportunity... and LOVE the fact that my wife and kids will be joining me there... and that my kids want to sit in on the session so they can hear me teach (I think they just want to see clips from movies that I normally don't let them watch!).

Hopefully the sessions will be recorded... and if they are I'll do my best to get them online here for any other comic geeks out their looking help their congregations become a little more geeky as well :-)

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