Well, so much for blogging from Europe. I guess it’ll still be something I need to do for quite a while. I do have a story or two to share from there, but for now, I’d like to talk about CCX 2006!

First, let’s approach the subject with some background. For those of you who have been reading my blog for over a year now, congratulations, because you already know what CCX is about! For the unfortunate, I’ll now quote what I wrote a year ago:

…CCX stands for Chinese Catholic Exchange. (Our official CCX website is http://theccx.org.) It was a joint camp/retreat between the two Chinese Catholic churches in Texas, my church near Dallas and the other church in Houston.

And so the retreat the past weekend (a really long weekend, at that) was the second annual CCX retreat. Last year’s CCX set my expectations very high for the next one, and that was only amplified by hearing about how much the Ascension Fellowship was preparing. I wasn’t disappointed at all; it was at least as good as last year. There were a lot of differences, but that didn’t make it any worse. There were around three times as many people this time, and it was nice seeing that many more people– not bad at all. One thing in particular that perhaps made it so much better than last year was that I knew more people better going into it, and it was nice spending time with good, familiar friends that you don’t normally get to see.

I’ve definitely felt like I’ve gained (or regained) something spiritually out of the retreat, but I felt that this year’s spiritual program reinforced more than taught. Last year Father Au did a good job of really spinning my mind around and showing it how to live a life of faith in new terms– I called it “brilliant” when I gave my CCX 2005 recap. I can’t say I really felt this way this year, but I definitely felt like my “spiritual batteries” had been recharged, ready to go for the coming school year. This is a bit of another difference, but I find it all right.

The music program was excellent. I liked the song selection, especially the CCX 2006 theme song, “Now That You’re Near.” It’s a great song, and I’m even listening to it right now, but it’s too bad I (and many other JFLers) had no idea how it went when we first got to CCX this year. Since it’s such a nice song, I’d prefer if they’d played it more times, too, but hey, we were all tired Sunday morning. We JFLers led the Chaplet of Divine Mercy Friday night, and that was definitely fun. We had barely figured out how everything went before we began leading it, but somehow it worked out pretty well. I always like how the Chaplet is sung.

The activities and games were excellent as well. Perry, Grace, and I (go Team Grace!) are especially happy about them since we completely won both times we played Megazord, which really doesn’t have anything to do with Power Rangers… I think. Click-bang is also a fun game that I imagine will probably be brought over to next year’s CCX. Canoeing was nice, especially since Perry, Judy, and I won the second group’s race. Water polo was also exciting, and my team won our first game of that while the first group of canoers did their thing. The second game of water polo was too hectic; there were definitely too many people, but I guess it was fun somehow somewhat.

Finally, the Houston people are always really cool. I’ve always valued every time I get to meet them, and CCX 2006 was no exception. I miss CCX, and I’m sure everyone else does too.

Too many awesome, fun things happened at CCX this year, really. I’ll have to leave at this for now. If there’s anything more extremely worthwhile to say about it, I’ll make sure to do so, but I feel like the experience counts more than the write-up about it. Even if I don’t write about something from CCX, I’ll keep the memories well.

Here are some pictures. More will probably be heading your way whenever Ivan gets his pictures up.