It is my duty to report that the insomnia lasted well into the night. At one point, Katie came to my door and said “You have GOT to go to sleep.”

To which I replied “I’m trrrrrrrrying to go to sleep, Katie! Sleep doesn’t like me anymore!”

In other words, a normal, mature response.

Well rested or not, our team is hitting the road in just a few minutes. After we stop for breakfast, of course. Gotta keep our priorities in order here.

Speaking of breakfast, I have A Very Important Question: where have all the grape Pop-Tarts gone? If you’re from the North, you’ve probably never enjoyed the goodness that is Grape Pop-Tarts because they are a regional thing. I grew up eating them and continued my love of them throughout my college years.

But then suddenly, they’re gone. I have researched this issue and it seems as though Kellogg’s has discontinued them due to “low consumer intake.” Which prompted me to send the following email to the Kellogg’s consumer complaints department:

“Dear Mr. Kellogg’s,

I have a Very Important Question to ask. Could you please bring back the grape Pop-Tarts? Pretty please? For the love of all things toaster-pastry, BRING BACK THE GRAPE POP-TARTS.

Love,

Amy Beth”

When I informed my roommate that I had sent this exact email and was expecting to hear back from Mr. Kelloggs very soon, she told me I was an idiot.

Sure, she says that now but wait until a case of grape Pop-Tarts shows up on our doorstep. She’ll be eating her words while I’m dining on a delicious dinner of Pop-Tarts.

Moving on : I’ve jokingly told my college girls that they could guest write one day and I’m proud to tell you that day has finally arrived. The lovely Magen, a college junior on our leadership team, has written a little thing-y about the “behind the scenes” of doing an event like the one we’re hosting this weekend. The fact that she refers to me as Miss Hot Rollers doesn’t bother me at all.

Even though it probably should.

“The truth is, Amy Beth only appears cool, calm and collected on this little blog. But come event time, she turns into Miss “Can I Possibly Fit One More Hot Roller In My Hair And Where The Heck Are The Air Mattresses.” It is quite the humorous sight.

At the end of one of these weekends trapped with a bunch of middle or high schoolers, we typically wonder how we could have possibly survived. The week before the sleep-deprived weekend is some sort of structured chaos, if that’s even possible. Our leadership team meeting before the event always leaves us anxious about how we will, once again, pull off the coolest girls’ sleepover ever! We start to think back about past events where failure seemed imminent. But we always wake up the next morning with our life and limbs still intact.

After all the waiting and wailing and gnashing of teeth, we finally set to work. We rehearse the dramas — which is the way we choose to present the message of Christ to the cookie-shoveling, glitter covered girls. Next, we tackle the food. Will we be making vats of spaghetti or will we just call up our friends at the local pizza place and have them do the cooking for us? My choice is the pizza, but we have tackled spaghetti a few times before… and it indeed looks like we’ve “tackled” it when we emerge from the kitchen. After feeding them, we kick things off with praise and worship with a rock flair! After the dramas, Miss Hot Rollers gives an altar call. When she goes up, we (leaders and volunteers) know that it is our cue to find our way to the front to prepare for the flood of girls who will soon rush to the altar. I have to say that, between the glitter and spaghetti sauce, watching a little girl who so desperately needs the hope only Jesus can offer makes all the lost hours of sleep worth it.

We only hope those warm-fuzzy feelings last until a few hours later when we’re threatening to take their freshly-applied polish right off their nails with polish remover if we don’t hear complete silence. With this particular event we’re doing this weekend, we try to get at least three precious hours of sleep before church starts the next morning.

In all honesty, these events are one of my favorite parts of being in an all-girls ministry. Not only do I get to have massive sleepovers with 20 of the best college girls in the world, but I get to see the faces of our little girls the morning after they’ve learned that Jesus not only loves them, but despite all their flaws, even likes them too.”

I’ll post an update at some point letting you know how things are going. Your prayers would be required appreciated.

Signing off,

Miss Hot Rollers

Pros of insomnia:

1. I just achieved my highest score ever on SuperCollapse.

2. I am definitely prayed up for this event.

3. All my hair supplies have been reorganized according to their purpose: straight, curly, big, flat.

Oh, who am I kidding?  I don’t believe in flat hair.

Cons of insomnia:

1. Both puppies asleep & roomie still out with her boyfriend, so no one to chat up. Not that I ever talk to my puppies.  ‘Cause I don’t.  I mean, usually I don’t.  Desperate times call for… well, you know.

2. I am very tempted to purchase something from QVC.

3. Unable to have glass of Sunny Delight due to sugar.  Sadly, sugar = more insomnia.  And more insomnia = Scary Sleep-Deprived Amy Beth.

With that, I’m going back to QVC.  I’ve been wanting a new set of frying pans.  Especially since I do so much cooking these days.

Unfortunately, no Friday’s Face today as hello? WE ARE ABOUT TO BE LEFT ALONE WITH A BUNCH OF GIRLS.

Really, are we sure that I’m old enough for this? Mature enough for this? Sane enough for this?

Whether or not, there’s no time to back out now. And so, I present: A Tour of Starlite’s Spa Stuff.

Alas, I can’t find my cord-y thing-y that makes the pictures go from my camera to my computer. And so, I hope you’ll embrace the cell phone pictures because THAT IS ALL I HAVE TO OFFER YOU.

Here we have part of our spa products that we use for our events. Please note that they not only have adorable labels with our logo on them, but that they are also in HOT PINK GLITTER CONTAINERS.

I know the glitter doesn’t really show up in the picture, but trust me, it is definitely there.

Why don’t we have a little peek inside?

Look, it is one of our manicure kits! We have these for both manicures and pedicures; we’ve got about 20 more of these, I think. And, again, the logo. We couldn’t help ourselves.

And here we have some spa kit contents. All the typical fabulous stuff!

But here’s where we took things to a whole new level:

Okay, I know it is a horrible picture but I TOLD YOU I CAN’T FIND THE CORD-Y THING-Y.

What you’re seeing above is a small laminated card that is each manicure and pedicure kit. Each card has drops of polish on it along with a coordinating number for the polish. This allows us to still give each girl a choice of what polish she wants but avoid a line of 300 girls at the polish station trying to figure out what color they want. Plus, we know to just buy these seven colors in bulk so we don’t run out.

Because I do not want to face a mob of angry girls who are upset that we’re out of shade #108 Pretty in Pink.

And with that thought in mind, I’m going to go check the spa containers again to make sure we packed enough polish. And the make-up kits. And the hair supplies.

Oh yeah. We have mass hair styling supplies, too.

But they are too sacred to be displayed on a hot pink bloggy. They are our most valued Starlite treasures.

Well, behind the processed nacho cheese, of course.

For more WFMW posts, go here.

This afternoon, while working in the Starlite office, I looked up to see my roommate sitting across from me.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“The real question is why aren’t you in class, Katie?

“Ignoring that. Answer my question please.”

“Um… I’m going to work late.”

“Nope, wrong.”

“Oh then, what am I doing?”

“Watching a movie with me and Eric.”

And since there is nothing more depressing fun than hanging out with your roommate and her boyfriend, in just a few minutes Katie, Eric, Snuggles, Cuddles and I are gonna pile into her bedroom and watch a movie. Notice I did not say “pile into her bed” because Eric’s getting the floor. With the puppies, of course.

In other news, I need to confess something to you. When I stopped by the grocery store on my way home from the office tonight, I was greeted by a massive display of Sunny Delight in the very front of the store. Without stopping to think, I actually whispered “If loving Sunny Delight is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.”

Oh yes I did.

We here at Starlite are t-minus 48 hours from watching a bus pull up with a bunch of girls expecting a fun 23-hour event.

In the spirit of keepin’ it real with ya’ll, I’d like to admit that we have no idea what we’re going to do with them.

And so, as we begin to panic think of ideas, would you be ever so kind to tell us who the heck you are?  Seriously, who is out there in hot pink bloggy land?  To make it fun, let’s add an extra category:

First name (or bloggy name if you’re all secreative!)

Where are you from?

AND…

Favorite hair product

(Oh don’t look so surprised. You knew it was coming.)

I’ll start:

Amy Beth

TN, baby!

Kerasase Lumiere Nutri-Sculpt, Matrix Amplify Foam Volumizer, FTX Curl Booster, Aussie Curl Hair Spray, Aussie Sprunch, Kerasase Oleo-Relax, Kerastase Expanseur Extra-Corps, Big Se-y Hair Root Pump Plus, etc.

(I’m sorry.  I couldn’t just stop at one.)

(I have an addition.  A hair care product addiction.)

(Send help.  Please.)

(Yeah, for the hair product addiction but mainly for the 23-hour SLEEPOVER.)

In the midst of what has been quite the stressful day (we have another high school sleepover coming up this weekend, this time in another town — need I say more?), I hear a quiet beep letting me know I have a text message from my roommate.  She’s the queen of sensing when I need a pick-me-up, so I was excited to see she had texted me.  That is, until I saw her message:

“Um, bad news.  The puppies may have eaten a chunk out of the sofa while you were gone today.”

Fabulous.

So, I called and left the puppies a little voicemail on their cellular devices:

“Good afternoon puppies, this is your mother.  First, mommy would like to begin by thanking you for waking me up by chewing on my toes at 3:06 a.m.  That was quite the delightful surprise.  Secondly, your Auntie Katie informs me, via text no less, that you two have been having an afternoon snack of mommy’s sofa.  Did we somehow forget our chat this morning as mommy was fixing her hair?  Oh, you did?  Well, here’s a recap: mommy told you that she’s trying to finish planning a sleepover for this weekend as well as continue to run 10 regular Starlite programs this week.  And, because mommy is a fool, she decided that this would be the week she would try to cut her daily caffeine consumption in half.  In other words, you puppies need to get your act together before mommy gets home tonight.  Which coincidentally will not be until after midnight because MOMMY IS TRYING TO RUN A MINISTRY HERE.  That will be all.  You may now return to your regularly scheduled activities of destroying all of mommy’s favorite shoes and leaving “surprises” in various rooms of our house.  And don’t wait up for me tonight.”

The only problem is that those silly puppies don’t always check their voicemail.  I have no idea who they learned that habit from.  No idea at all.

Remember how I mentioned that my college-aged leaders each have a journal where they can write to me each week and then I respond back to them?  When I was reading through Anna’s journal this week, I realized that she had actually left the written rough draft of a letter to her landlord in the journal before leaving it on my desk.  I got her permission to share it with you because it reminded me of every horrible apartment I lived in during college and all of the weird landlords that came with those apartments.

“Dear Frank,

First, we’d like to say that we have enjoyed our semester living in this apartment.  It’s fascinating, unique and has such an interesting history.

Secondly, we’d like to thank you for the offers to work at your office.  We’d love to work in your store and use our experience to help boost sales.  However, since the day we moved in, a large portion of our living room floor and part of our dining room floor has been gone.

The men who worked on it assured us repeatedly that it would be fixed soon but here it is, our 4th month living here, and our floor is still missing.  We’ve also been without a kitchen light for a couple of months as well.  It’s been a bit frightening to not be able to see who might be at our back door at night.

Also, our gas bill for the month of March cost more than our rent.  And we don’t know why.

We don’t know if there may be a miscommunication with the management or the workers, but we would like to see these problems taken care of.  We ask you to consider the fact that there is one vacant apartment in this building currently and there may be another vacant one soon.  If friends or other students ask us about our experience with the the ———  ——- Company, we would like to be able to answer truthfully that our experience has been a good one.”

I’m not sure why it makes me laugh so much, but I’ve read and re-read it several times this week.  I love how she mentions that “our floor is still missing.”  And that the landlord wants to know if she and her roommates will work for him.  Unbelievable.

Well said, Anna.

When I walked into my Twinkle program yesterday, one of my fourth grade girls ran up to me holding something behind her back. She was talking so fast that I could barely understand, but I finally figured out that she had made me something. She produced a paper cube, obviously homemade. It had been carefully taped together and adorned with “Miss Amy Beth” on all sides in light pencil. Her grin grew wider with every exclamation I made about the paper cube.

After the little girl walked away, one of our volunteers who had been watching the exchange told me that the girl had been very upset when I wasn’t already in the school library when she walked in for Twinkle. The little girl had given our volunteer a peek at the paper cube and explained how it came to be:

“A long time ago — months ago, Miss Cara! — I started working on this paper cube. I kept adding things to it and fixing it until it was perfect. I didn’t know who I was making it for, but I kept it safe and made sure it didn’t get smashed in my backpack. When I met Miss Amy Beth, I finally realized that I had been making the paper cube for her all along even though I didn’t know her yet.”

One of the interesting things about a bloggy is that it only gives you a brief snapshot of what is going on in a particular day. Many days I post our “best” moment of the day. I don’t usually put our dirty laundry out for all of the interlings to see, mainly because a lot of the time, it isn’t my laundry to share.

The truth is that ministry can be tough. Really, really tough. I remember going to a conference a couple of years ago and listening to the speaker talk about how, in her early years of ministry, she’d desperately want to walk right out of her office and just give up. She said that on some particular days, she would have to lay on the floor of her office gripping the furniture to keep herself from leaving.

I’m not quite to that point today, but I sure have been on other days.

I don’t want to get another call telling me that a girl in our middle school program is being violently abused at home. I don’t want to listen to a 3rd grader ask me for another portion of snack to take home because she knows there won’t be food on the dinner table that night. I don’t want to watch one of my college-aged volunteers sit across from me and sob because she can’t change the decision she made last night.

I don’t want to wonder where the money for the future will come from. I don’t want to be the one making the tough decisions and setting the rules into place. I don’t always want so much responsibility when I’m so young and still lacking maturity and discipline in so many different areas of my life.

But this? This thing we call Starlite? This is my very own paper cube.

Just like that fourth grade girl, I started working on my paper cube a long time ago. I made phone calls and sent emails and begged for money and painted office walls and sat in principal’s offices and wrote proposals and did without personally and cried and laughed and failed some life tests while I passed others. And the whole time I was doing it, I didn’t know who was going to benefit from my attempt at a paper cube of a ministry. But God held onto it and He protected it from being smashed in my figurative backpack until the day came when He could pull it out and offer it to the girls we serve today.

And, quite literally, thank God He did because there’s no telling what kind of mess we’d be in if He had left things up to me.

One of the projects that I’m working on for Starlite right now, since I have oodles of spare time just wasting away, is a massive re-design of our website. If you’ve visited it lately, you’ve been met with a lovely greeting sending you right on over to all of us here at MinSoFab.

I can only hope that none of our donors are scared away by my obsession with hair products. And hot rollers. And, of course, Shamu.

Anyway, the new site is going to have all kinds of fun features. There will be sections for each of our three program offerings as well as information about the ten different locations you can find them. There will be a page explaining what we do and how we do it (don’t worry — I didn’t mention the processed nacho cheese). There will even be a section of booking information if you’d like to have me come to your church to speak.

Or, you know, to throw up. We like to offer a variety of options for churches.

Listen, people… it only happened one time.

Well, so far.

Moving on: the section I’m working on now is all about volunteering in Starlite. I’ve asked three of our current volunteers / leaders to share about their experiences with Starlite. I’m not going to force let you read all three, but I thought you might like a sneak peek at one of their stories:

“I wish I could say that it was a beaming light from heaven that brought me to Starlite rather than the pink flyer advertising free ice cream, but I’m ashamed to say it was the ice cream that drew me in. Looking back, I can see that my decision to become a part of Starlite was from a much greater influence than any ice cream sundae; it was God’s plan for my freshman year of college. God used a ministry that I thought was only about investing in others to pour into me!

Through working alongside the other Starlite volunteers, I’ve seen true servant leadership — especially during our special events such as lock-ins. There is nothing I love more than to see literally hundreds of young girls praising God and yearning for more of Him. But it isn’t just the young girls that we serve that I like to watch — it is also the leaders, the volunteers… all of the people that make it happen! It is looking around the room and realizing that typing ribbons on 1,300 invitations was worth it. It is looking around the room and knowing that our hard work leading up to the event was not in vain. But most of all, it is looking around the room and knowing that what we have been praying for is being accomplished. God is being made known in each of these girls’ lives!

That’s why I do Starlite — not because I love to tie ribbons on invitations, nor because it taught me how to make 300 pancakes in 20 minutes and heaven knows it isn’t because I enjoy serving nacho cheese to the girls at my program each week. I serve in Starlite because I’ve seen firsthand that it is about being able to walk away at the end of the day confident in the God I serve… a God that will work through me or even in spite of me.”

My roommate, Katie, usually comes to help with my Monday afternoon Starlite program.  I somehow ended up with the largest group of elementary school girls, and so after listening to me complain talk about it, Katie was forced offered to help.

She just called me to ask what snack we were having later this afternoon.  When I told her we were having chocolate Little Debbie snack cakes, I got the following reply:

“Really?  I hope there are a lot of girls absent from our program today so I can eat their Little Debbie cakes.  I’m starving.”

Her compassion continues to astound me.