The Breakfast Club

I tried a number of times during my years at Springfield Friends Meeting to start a before school Bible study (Breakfast Club) for high school students, but the distance from the church to the schools always made it too complicated.  The youth at FUMC-K had previously had such a program, and with Gateway and Osceola High Schools being just minutes away, I was very excited to resume the tradition.  In September of 1994 we began meeting in the Youth Room at 6:15 AM on Tuesdays.  Our crowds were never large, but they were faithful.  We moved to meetings to Thursday mornings at one point, and then back to Tuesdays, and the time changed several times as well.  But no matter when, we would gather for cereal, doughnuts, juice and Bible study, and it was always a great way to start our day.

Jocelyn Sessions (pictured on the 1996 Memphis SOS Mission Trip) was a very important and very faithful part of those early Breakfast Club meetings.  While I tried to provide a variety of cereal choices and doughnuts for our group, Jocelyn usually arrived with her own plain bagel and her own glass of water, because, quite frankly, Cocoa Krispies, Captain Crunch and Krispy Kreme doughnuts didn't fit her healthy lifestyle very well.  Jocelyn had a hard time remembering to take her glass with her at the end of the meetings.  Each week I would collect the glass and save it.  After a month or so of this happening, we set the full set of glasses out for the group to use one morning.  In classic Jocelyn style, she walked in, observed the glasses and said, "We have glasses just like those!"  I think our response was "Not any more!"   Cathy Thacker, the other adult who frequented the Club in those early days, always helped us keep a spiritual focus in the midst of such early morning silliness.  No matter who was there, it was always special.

There are many more Jocelyn stories to tell, and quite a few of them involved trips to New York.  I hadn't planned to go to New York in 1994, but the Class of '95 had other ideas.  Hang around all week to hear about them and the first NYC trip from Kissimmee.

Because of Jesus,