The Journey 2022

Written by: Adam Borsay, Youth Director

This past Christmas break, the Gateway Youth took their annual trip to Camp Michindoh for The Journey. For nearly 20 years, Gateway Church has taken students on an overnight retreat to focus on our mission of connecting students to Jesus Christ and one another. The busyness of life can create so many roadblocks for our students to invest in one another and their relationship with God. A weekend retreat serves as an opportunity to push them forward in their spiritual and relational growth.

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Starting early on Friday, December 30, we kick off with our parents favorite part of the retreat: we take away everyone's phones! The kids don’t like it but within an hour the difference in how they interact and connect is obvious. We would even recommend “digital fasts” on specific days and evenings at your own home. You will be amazed at what happens!

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Arriving at Camp Michindoh by late morning, our camp experience starts right away. With only 36 hours, we don’t want to waste a minute! This year our theme was ‘The Pause’. Everything we did was focused on challenging the students (and ourselves) to make a regular and daily pattern of setting aside time to be in the Bible and prayer. The Gospel invites us into a personal relationship with God. Like any relationship, we benefit the most when we are invested in it.

Our students are pulled in so many directions for things that are good things to do: school, sports, family, etc. It can become easy to think there is just no time for regular devotionals in life. This year's Journey spoke to how we actually should START with God and then fit in everything else. While there can be good things we are involved with, NOTHING is more important than our relationship with God! 

Even with very little sleep and plenty of sugar, the kids had a great time and many of them have talked about the encouragement and challenges they had from the sessions and small group conversations throughout the weekend. During the month of January, we will be following up on the theme by expanding on each of the main ideas from The Journey during our Sunday night youth Life Groups. 

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Hope to see everyone back next year!