Coffee and Nail Polish

What do these two things below mean to me?

For many a cup of coffee and nail polish means an hour of relaxing, vegging out to a good movie, or a date with a good girl friend. But to me it represents a weekend of late nights and early mornings, a lot of expended energy, and countless amazing talks with high school students. This weekend I helped out at a winter camp where I "mentored" one student all weekend. I'm always blown away at what God does in the lives of students at camps. How He shows them such unique things that I could never have dreamed of "teaching" when I said yes to taking on the task. He takes their hearts in His gentle, molding, hands and makes them a little bit more like His Son. 

So what do coffee and nail polish mean in all of this? I could find some "deep", but inevitability cheezy analogy for them (I'm a Bible College [almost] grad, I could do it!). I will spare you. To me these two things are part of my philosophy of youth ministry. The nearly empty coffee cup is sometimes the only energy I can have left, but THATS OK because it means that I am giving all I can to love students. And the nail polish is tool. Its one of the simple things that I can do to love someone else, let someone know that my time is specifically put aside for THEM. It shows that I want to go to them and meet them in their place of comfort. I want to love students the way that they feel loved because I'm pretty sure thats what Jesus did.

Maybe I'm preaching to the choir...who knows? But it was the lesson I walked away with from this camp. I cannot wait to get to Germany and do this all the time. It may mean a lot more coffee (please pray against addiction lol). It may mean that I have to buy stock in a nail polish company. But its all perfectly fine as long as Christ is glorified as students fall for Him.