Sun Up

Sun Up is a fantastic youth weekend beginning Holy Saturday, including a dawn service on the Warren beach at 6am on Easter Sunday morning. It is run by the Diocesan Youth Council, in conjunction with the youth group in Rosscarbery. This year was a huge success, once again. The weekend was made up of a variety of relaxed activities held over the duration of the two days. It kicked off at 2pm on Saturday and started with a series of icebreaker games, providing an opportunity to talk to people you hadn't met before. It was a fun way to start the weekend and was followed by a huge orienteering activity. This covered the town and surrounding areas of Rosscarbery, and was a lot harder than anyone had expected! It involved teams of approx. 6 people, each of whom were given 15 photographs and clues of things around the area. We had to decipher the clues and find the images in the photographs around the town, and then take our own photo of the images as proof...It took quite a while and at the end of it, many teams gave up and ended up taking photos of the photos they had been given! The orienteering though difficult, was good fun! This followed on by a session of one-on-one gaming, including games such as Battle Ships, Scrabble, Frustration and giant Jenga. This allowed for some people's competitive streak to really shine! After four minutes a round, it also provided the virtually impossible task of counting up the scores for poor Clive! All in all the afternoon was extremely entertaining to say the least!
 
This followed by the long awaited food, which turned out to be as delicious as hoped, especially the desserts! After the meal came Worship. This was led by Jimmie (James) and accompanied by Ben on the guitar. It covered the topic of "What is Faith?". This session made us all very aware of the things in life that we take for granted, that most of us hadn't put that much thought into before. It was a very relaxed environment in which we got the opportunity to share our own views and opinions on the topic in small group discussions. It was very fulfilling & enjoyable. We then proceeded to the sports hall in the town where we played one of Ben's very unusual games involving a Frisbee. It did take some teams quite a while to master the art of throwing and catching the Frisbee, proving more difficult than could be imagined! We finished up the night back at the hall with a film; all snuggled up in our sleeping bags, munching on nibbles! We finally decided to settle down for as much sleep as possible at approximately 3am knowing full well we would have to be up for the early rise of 5.30am!
 
When 5.30am did come around, we were all but willing to get up and go to the beach in the cold, rainy weather! However, we did all somehow make it down there and stood through the dawn service held by Rev. Chris Peters. By the end of it I think it is safe to say we were all extremely cold and a tad wet to say the least! As you can imagine, the BBQ breakfast that followed was duly welcomed by all! This did indeed warm us up with sausage, bacon, onion, pudding rolls and cups of hot tea. We soon returned to the hall and spent the remainder of the morning watching more films as no one wanted to be out in the cold doing anything! Our parents collected us at 11am on the Sunday morning after a fabulous weekend. I had a great time with old friends and made many new ones too. I greatly recommend for anyone of secondary school age, who wants to have an enjoyable, enriching weekend, to go to this event next year!
 
Jessica Elstob