Mondaymail 11/3/08 November 3, 2008

Good Evening Everyone!

Betsy and I have just polished off some good chips and salsa after meeting to discuss our hot new plans and spent a bit of time texting back and forth with our gregarious youth. Plans in place and phones folded, I can now spend some time with you!

On Sunday we spent the Sunday school hour visiting our mission trips and sharing them with the parish. We finally got Abby’s video to play! I really enjoyed it and had a number of people tell me afterwards that they were rather impressed by our youth.

Sunday night sported pumpkin-based games for the chi rho and an HGTV-type moment for the senior high in which they gave us some input for the renovation of the youth rooms. I have high hopes for some of their ideas and much appreciated Clare’s editing away the impossible from our list!

This week holds two remarkable opportunities. For the parents, Mark DeVries, renowned speaker and Youth Architects founder, will be giving a talk at a dinner held in the Great Hall on Saturday at 6:30 pm. The cost is $15, childcare is free. Please RSVP to Tiffany Luxon here.

The youth in turn have a truly extraordinary opportunity to meet Lord George Carey, the 103^rd Archbishop of Canterbury, who is in town and holding a youth night at Canterbury also on Saturday. So, families should meet at the church so that the youth department can carpool over to SMU while the parents remain for Mark’s talk. Please RSVP to me here if your youth wishes to come to our event.

Sunday night will be low-key as Betsy and I will have had all manner of whirlwind activities during the week and weekend and because we really want to emphasize the importance of the visit of Lord George Carey. Nevertheless, we will be watching Winn-Dixie in the youth room if youth want to get together on Sunday night.

In His Grip,

Bev

Mondaymail 9/15 September 15, 2008

Hello one and all!

I’m always so blessed to be pulled into the life of our church and lives of our youth. Thank you all also for being mindful of those parts of my life apart from the church. Thanks to all of you who expressed concern for my hometown, Shoreacres, recently smacked around by Ike. I still don’t know the extent of the hurricane damage to my home, but I will include a snippet in the mondaymail when I find out!

We had a great start to the year yesterday with a great bunch of youth in Sunday school and evening programs! As the Sunday school curriculum on the schedule for the first block is entitled Life Roller Coaster, we spent Sunday school exploring what the metaphor of a roller coaster does when applied to our lives in faith and without faith. The base scripture for the evening groups was the parable of the lost sheep, and we worked out the efforts and joys of finding things and people we’d loved, lost and found.

This weekend promises to be very very busy! We have JOLT on Saturday with the junior high group..  The fun, fabulous stuff we’ll be doing is Scavenger hunt, Rappelling, Orienteering and Waders in the Wetlands.  It should be great both for the sake of the beautiful camp and fun activities but also to give the Chi Rho youth a chance to bond and grow together.  The cost is $20.  We’ll meet at 8 am at the church and be back at 7:30 pm.  For more info, go here. Please RSVP to me here ASAP if your youth would like to come!

The very next day, September 21, we will be going to Cathedral Gardens for a round two of our very popular Bingo Night!!! Thanks so much to Ellen McDowell for organizing the organizers, Tracy, Logan and Preston Klein, and thank you to our organizers as well!! We will depart COTI at 4:45, play some serious Bingo with some good youth-y prizes as well and dine at Cathedral Gardens and then be picked up at Cathedral Gardens.  Senior highers over the age of 16 are encouraged to drive themselves to the Cathedral and meet us there at 5 pm. RSVP to Tracy Klein here if you can go!

Our Ski Trip this year is going to be AWESOMEEEEE!!!! But there is limited space and soon deadlines, so let me know ASAP if you or your youth want to come.  We have about 14 more spaces at present. We’ll be flying American Airlines departing DFW on Dec 26 at 7:20 am and returning to DFW at 9:55 pm on Dec 29.  We’ll be at Beaver Creek staying at Beaver Village in condominiums. The cost will be $800 per person. RSVP to me here.

And those glasses are still in my office from the kickoff, so if you’ve been bumping into things in your blindness, gimme a call!

Much love to all of you!

In His Grip,

Beverly Fonville Steele

Mondaymail 9/8/08 September 8, 2008

Woohoo!!!! We’re still riding high on the overwhelming success of Rally Day yesterday! It was wonderful to see so many of you, particularly those of you I hadn’t seen in a while! Thanks for coming and sharing the day with us!

The thanks are going to continue for a while here! So many people did such wonderful work getting the day off the ground, and I sincerely thank you all. HUGE HUGE HUGE thanks go to Claire Upham, Ellen Welch and Melinda Draper for the fantastic job they did putting last night together! The decorations were amazing and the entertainment sublime! Thank you all so much for everything.

We also had a good number of you guys sign up to be sponsors for various events, and I thank you heartily! Ellen McDowell and Teresa Clarke, our event coordinators, also send their warm thanks! It’s truly only with the help of parents than any of our work here is possible.

On that note, the one place we could still use some help is the providing of meals for Sunday nights. Anne Mackintosh is the point person for that and would LOVE to hear from you if you can sponsor a meal. Sponsoring a meal means either bringing it to the church at 6 pm for about 35 people or paying to have it delivered. I’ll be happy to give you some ideas for things to bring or buy if you’d like!

Now onto the upcoming stuff! This week marks the beginning of our regular EYC and Chi Rho. Chi Rho goes from 5 pm to 6:30 pm, and EYC goes from 6 pm to 7:30 pm. I hope to see everyone there! It’ll be great!

Also, September 20, we have a GREAT opportunity to go to All Saints Camp and participate in their JOLT. For more info, go here. The fun, fabulous stuff we’ll be doing is Scavenger hunt, Rappelling, Orienteering and Waders in the Wetlands. It should be great both for the sake of the beautiful camp and fun activities but also to give the Chi Rho youth a chance to bond and grow together. The cost is $20. We’ll meet at 8 am at the church and be back at 7:30 pm. Please RSVP to me here ASAP if your youth would like to come!

The very next day, September 21, we will be going to Cathedral Gardens for a round two of our very popular Bingo Night!!! Thanks so much to Ellen McDowell for organizing the organizers, Tracy, Logan and Preston Klein, and thank you to our organizers as well!! We will depart COTI at 4:45, play some serious Bingo with some good youth-y prizes as well and dine at Cathedral Gardens and then be picked up at Cathedral Gardens. RSVP to Tracy Klein here if you can go!

Our Ski Trip this year is going to be AWESOMEEEEE!!!! But there is limited space and soon deadlines, so let me know ASAP if you or your youth want to come. We’ll be flying American Airlines departing DFW on Dec 26 at 7:20 am and returning to DFW at 9:55 pm on Dec 29. We’ll be at Beaver Creek staying at Beaver Village in condominiums. The cost will be $800 per person. RSVP to me here.

And I hope many if not all of you got our youth ministry bulletin that includes the calendar on the inside. If not, I’ve attached the word document version of the calendar to this email. One very important edit: Patrice Miller is NOT in charge of the Habitat for Humanity workday the first week of November. Ellen McDowell is. So if you wanna go, email Ellen here. It’s a great, great opportunity to be together helping someone achieve the dream of being a homeowner. As it’s the last day, we also get to see the final product, landscaping and all, which is gratifying indeed!

Having mentioned several service opportunities, I want to remind you all that we do an incredible amount as a youth ministry and as a parish to serve our community, and that is one of the principle calls of our faith. So when youth need service hours, they should not despair, they should call me! And hopefully too they will come even when the hours mean nothing to them.

And someone left their glasses at the event last night, so if you’re having trouble seeing today, give me a call!

Okay folks, as I am now going well above my usual word limit, I will leave you be! But I am SO EXCITED to be beginning this year!

In His Grip,

Beverly Fonville Steele

Mondaymail (mild misnomer) Sept Dos September 2, 2008

Dear All You Beloved Folks!

We are truly kicking into gear with the year in swing, and the biggest thing coming our way and the focus of this Mondaymail:

RALLY DAY!!! Great info, fun, fellowship and seeing all the folks you’ve missed and meet the new ones, particularly our new and amazing Betsy and Bishop Burton and his family!

We will be rallying ‘round the rector in the morning, but especially for us youth-centered folk, the evening will be HUGE! Ellen Welch, Melinda Draper and Claire Upham have gone truly above and beyond the call of duty to get an awesome, AWESOME evening underway. We’re still waiting for RSVPs from a lot of you guys, and we really do need to know what sort of attendance we’ll have. There will be great food, inflatable games, a dunking booth (might we dunk Bishop Burton??? I hear a call for that one!). The crazy times start at 5 pm and go until 7:30. The event is for parents and youth alike, so come one and all!

Get this:

We’ll even be raffling off some tickets to such fabulous events as the Great Pumpkin Chase, Ski Trip and Mission trips!

But you have to be there to win!

So please email myself or Ellen to RSVP.

The Sunday following, September 14, is when EYC and Chi Rho as well as Sunday school start up again on the usual schedule.

On September 20, we’ll have a really great opportunity for the Chi Rho youth to go on an outdoors adventure at All Saints Camp. We’ll be rappelling down walls and doing some orienteering and general nature fabulousness with the well-trained guides at our diocesan camp. Tom and Gail Smith will be helping organize the parental troops, and the sooner you RSVP to me, the sooner I’ll have seatbelts for all involved!

Also, this year we snagged an AWESOME deal on ski trip, including FLIGHTS instead of a BUS! But that does mean we need to bump up the sign up to soon. We leave the day AFTER Christmas this year and return on the 29^th, which hopefully gives you plenty of time for family festivities! The cost is $800 per person. Friends are, as always, welcome! Let me know that you’re coming—I intend to learn how to ski this year and will need someone to sit with me when I break my arm again! Just kidding… I hope!

Okay fabulous people, I have to run away and do other work now, but know that you are loved and prayed over!

In His Grip,

Beverly Fonville Steele

Mondaymail Start of School! August 25, 2008

Good morning everybody!

Life has been good the past few weeks—I got the chance to go visit the folks and see two of my childhood friends get married, and it was very refreshing! Now I’m back and ready for action, and I hear rumors that Betsy is in Dallas and gearing up as well! Her technical first day is on Wednesday, at which point all the fun will begin!

On the list of upcoming wonderfulness is first and foremost RALLY DAY!!!! It will be a two-pronged adventure, starting in the morning with traditional Rally Day fair, a little jazzed up to welcome in our new rector, and following up with our own fabulous youth rally event. The youth event has been organized by our very own wonderful Claire Upham, Melinda Draper and Ellen Welch, and they have all manner of goodies and activities lined up for youth and parents alike. We will even have a dunking booth and awesome inflatable games, not to mention the Hamburger Man and Harry’s yogurt. Really guys, you have to come!

Betsy’s first day is WEDNESDAY!!! I’m sure she can’t wait to meet and visit with all of you, and I intend to claim a little Betsy time myselfJ.

The new rector has also arrived, and I have been quite delighted by our short interactions. His wife and children are also very endearing, and Caroline will be joining in the fun of Chi Rho this year!

I’ll be keeping all the youth in my prayers today as they suck it up and brave the hallways for another great year at school!

In His Grip,

Bev

August 4, 2008

I sit here on the other side of the summer because I can hardly stand! What a good one too! We had a number of good chi rho and EYC meetings with new and old faces, two great mission trips and a Summer Splash that left parents calling to thank me (and all of your youth) for running a great camp for their kids! So I sit happily:-). A HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who made those things possible. If it weren’t for you, I’d not be sitting, I’d be catatonic and there would have been no summer.

The weekend included a variety of entertaining moments, not the least of which was my discovery that the “summer at a glance” sheet had included the wrong date for our end of summer party! Many, many apologies to Susan and Ernest Beecherl for this mix up as well as much, much gratitude for your flexibility. As it is, we had a good turnout at both the Saturday function as well as a dinner we held on Sunday for those expecting that day to be our evening of insanity. Thank you to Scottie Clarke and Kristen Arnold for the at-table entertainment on Sunday. We made the other tables laugh too.

This does mean, however, that our summer events are keying down as we approach the new year. We have plans afoot for a GREAT kick-off, showcasing the upcoming events like favorites the Great Pumpkin Chase at the SKI TRIP! We will be flying to Colorado this year, for your information. No more 23-hour bus rides for us! Plus there will be food from the Hamburger Man, a dunking booth (might we persuade Fr. Matthew to hop in???), and a plethora of information! It’ll be a great time to meet Betsy as well as Bishop Tony and his family, including Caroline and Peter, who hopefully will be joining the ranks of the youth group. The event of fabulousness will take place Sunday, September 7, 5-7:30 pm. You snooze, you lose BIG TIME on this one!

As I said last week, Peter Overland will be championing the sprucing of our youth room on the upcoming church-wide workday. This is something I highly encourage you guys to get involved in. It’s a great way to spend time working with your youth on something that’s important to them, to meet and mingle with other church members, and to put ourselves physically into this space that we have dedicated to our youth. We want to come away with it looking like a place we’d want to hang out in, and we want it to more clearly say “hey! We love you, youth!” Come and join us. It’ll be a great time. And, of course, I’ll sign all the school service forms. The work days are August 22 and 23, 9am-4 pm.

I am also still keen on getting a few more Sunday school teachers into the mix!!! We’re a fun group!! And we want to make this year’s Sunday school engaging and interesting for our youth.

I do believe that concludes this edition of the Mondaymail. Let me know if there are any other issues you’d like me to talk about or ponder on!

In His Grip,

Bev

CHANGE OF PLANS August 3, 2008

Dear All,

Due to a calendar mistake, there was some confusion over the date of the end of summer party.  My sincere apologies especially to Susan and Ernest Beecherl, the hosts of the party, as well as to any and all of you who were inconvenienced or confused.  Due to the mix-up, we are having an end-of-the-summer dinner tomorrow night at On the Border Mexican Grill, located at 3130 Knox, at 5:30 pm.  Please let me know if you and/or your youth will be attending so I can be sure we have an appropriate number of tables.  The cost of the dinner will be $10 per person.

Thank you all and I hope you have a lovely evening!

Mondaymail July 28 July 28, 2008

Top o’ the mornin’ to you!

I hope you all had wonderful weekend in spite of our famous Texas heat! Certainly in the mid-Splash exhaustion your youth were somewhat sedated! If not, well, we’ll try to wear them out this week.

1) Incidentally, Summer Splash is going well! It seems like the two weeks will be enough to quench the appetite without wearing people out. A big, big, HUGE thanks to the Beecherls for lending us their house and pool as well as to our fabulous drivers who have been so good to show up and ferry everyone around, particularly Teresa Clarke, Ellen Welch, Elizabeth Tschiemer, Beth Bilbo, Liz Dunn, Anne Mackintosh and Louise Watkins. We truly couldn’t have done it without you!

2) Chi Rho this week will NOT be at Aziza and Alexia’s home as advertised in the bulletin. By popular demand, we’ll be going to the Studio Movie Grill located at Royal and Central Expressway to see Mamma Mia. The movie starts at 7:10, but let’s try to gather at 6:45 to get situated and visit a bit. The film should end at 9 pm. Tickets are $6.50 for children, and the menu can be found at http://www.studiomoviegrill.com/menu.html. Kids will be responsible for paying for their food.

3) EYC and Chi Rho will have our end of the summer shebang on Sunday at the home of Ellen, Bobby and Caroline Beecherl (and Susan, Ernest and Ernie too!) starting at 5:30 pm. We’ll hang out, grill, and generally have a good time!

Of course, this does tie up our summer! It’s time for a tiny break before school starts again! But lest you fear that I’ll be sitting here gathering moss, I’ll give you a run down of things you can expect to be happening:

1) Peter Overland, formerly of the outreach department, is in charge of sprucing up the youth room before Betsy and Bishop Burton arrive. He and I will be liaising and working out the details in coming weeks to be able to rock things out August 22 and 23. If you’d like to come help, please sign up at www.incarnation.org. We’d love to have you!

2) We’ll be having our own department kickoff on the evening of Sept 7. Yes, we will be at the church-wide rally day that morning, but you don’t want to miss the evening activities! Claire Upham, Melinda Draper and Ellen Welch are cooking up a festival to behold! We’ll have all manner of food, inflatable bungee runs, and, for the more organizationally minded among us, the upcoming year’s calendar and forms. I cannot tell you how excited we are!

3) We are revamping our Sunday school with the help of our consultants, and we’d love a few more teachers to come onboard so that we can spend some time in August engaging each other over the new curriculum.

4) Betsy will be arriving August 27! Hurrrrrraaaaah!!!!!

Monday Night Mondaymail July 22, 2008

Hey hey!

It is indeed still a Mondaymail, even if it is coming a little later in the day than the standard! Please accept our apologies—the internet was completely down at the office for the greater part of the day, and I naturally was out Summer Splashin’ it up the rest of the day! I am now, as promised previously on the blog, perched at a coffee shop ready to fill you in.

1. Which, of course, brings me to the Summer Splash phenomenon which is doing phenomenally! We even had a few more people show up today who hadn’t quite yet gotten in their registration, but that was fine by us once we rustled up a few extra drivers to fill in the gaps! For those of you who are scratching your heads, Summer Splash is the youth-run VBS currently in session. If you have some free time this week, stop by and check it out! At the pool, you will likely find the boys trying to see who can splash me the most via cannonball. Bradley Bilbo currently leads the team, though Wheeler Butler is a close second.

1. Also this week, Chi Rho will be meeting at Willy Beecherl’s house, 3818 Shenandoah, at 5:30 pm for burgers, swimming and a movie. The boys are threatening not to come because I’m wanting Mamma Mia. Soooo, since I heard a request for the Inwood and Journey to the Center of the Earth is playing there, we’ll be seeing the 7:15 showing of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Please tell your boys. at 1 hr 32 minutes, we should be finished a quarter to 9. Also, always, I can use some drivers!

1. EYC will be meeting at Sarah Beecherl’s house this coming Sunday, surprisingly also 3818 Shenandoah, also at 5:30 pm. Based on this week’s movie poll, we’ll likely be seeing the Dark Knight at some as yet undetermined theater.

Alrighty then! My bed is calling from a few miles away since I need to be up bright and early to fill the baby pools for the sports section of Splash!

Good night and God bless!

Bev

ewww computers! July 21, 2008

Sadly, the net is down at COTI and has been all morning, and I just can’t bring myself to write my Mondaymail on blackberry! So, I’ll write you tonight from some coffee house with free wifi!