Men's Conferance

Despite a few dozen whoops and obstacles, I was able to manage to bring my brothers up to the conferance this year. Men's confereance consists of a few dozen guys from First Presbytarian Church/Fresno and another few dozen guys from First Presbytarian Church/Viselia. This year also brought some men from Bethel Inner City church, which is a small but quickly growing church who borrows use of the church grounds to hold sermons and community events. All together, we had gathered up in the seirras to talk, hang out, worship..and of course debate which activity was better: shooting people with paintballs or trees with real ammunition.

Today was a good day for Worship and study. The topic had to do with some intresting questions regarding what the bible says in regards to fatherhood andmanhood in general. It also had us debating, in usual presbytarian fashion, wether Jesus made a good role models for dads if he did'nt have kids, or good role model for young men when he did'nt date or marry. It was good to be able to dig around in a little in the scriptures a little. It was also a good chance to see many of the church laity discussing thier personal walks with christ and struggles they were having.

We also, of course, got a chance to answer another question: real guns or paint? Free time was spent in a variety of ways, from men hiking, golfing, shooting and paintballing. I took my brother down to the paint ball field, which is just a section of national forest that the squirrels have learned to avoid this time of year. FOr good reason too. We dived down gullys, delivered uphill assaults around fallen sequioas and even crawled trough the bark to get that one clean shot. We had a slight problem in firnedly fire in that we did'nt wear the provided markers (Pat Alexander showed up with redlace and pink polka dots for us. Ha, Ha pat :p ) but instead had used a nice to cut towels into strips for idefication. My brothers certainly enjoyed themselves, altough Patrick (my brother) needs to learn the old phrase: "Cover or God, everyone finds something in a firefight"

All in all we had a great time. My brothers are;nt to keen on the large amount of bible study or worship time involved, but did get a chance to connect with some of the people at church. I also got a chance to pick up a few new stories to tell around the fires ;)