Before I move on, I had to upload the videos all to my personal Youtube account. For some reason, I wasn't able to continue editing them together. Here is the web address: http://www.youtube.com/user/picako7
Back to what we did today!
This morning was a tough day to get up...but we did! We woke up around 6:15am and got to the expo center around 7am. Breakfast was full of teens dragging themselves into the food line and sleepily putting food into their mouths. You can see this silly reality on one of the youtube videos!
After breakfast, we jumped right into our session, where James Grout spoke again on the role of the church. He discussed how we are to be a solid unit who is there for one another and there for moving out and being the church in the streets, not just in the four walls where we live.
The coolest thing that happened during this session was the missionary walk. Each LIFE missionaries from the CMA carry their flags down to the center of the stage and show where they are evangelizing to and what country they are giving their lives to.
This was a very inspiring sight (and always is). It tugs at the heart and forces one to see how many people (just by the amount of countries represented) need to hear the good news of Christ.
The worship was excellent as usual and like I said before, James brought a tough but good message.
Like our normal LIFE schedule, after the session, seminars were open. We all end up splitting up going to different seminars and many of the teens came back with some great reports of all that they were learning in their seminars.
After the first seminar session time, was LUNCH. People weren't dragging as badly as they were for breakfast, but they were still a bit tired. I myself got 2 free shots of espresso from the college espresso booth! It jolted me right up.
After lunch was more seminars, which some teens went to and other didn't. Some students were so tired that they passed out on the couches at the Nyack booth. We decided they've gone to all the other hours of seminars, so if they decided to get some rest or hang with new friends during this time, that would be OK.
Some students however, came back excited and on fire from some of the seminars they had attended and were more than excited and willing to share what God was saying to them.
After the seminars was a bit of free time, which some more resting took place and others were doing all the activities they could before it was time to shut them down. Steven Kimpel challenged me to a race in a blow up obstacle course. I totally CRUSHED him! OK, sorry he beat me, but it was only by a bit.
Dinner happened and was good.
After dinner, it was time to go back to the very last session of LIFE 2010. It was sad, but also good because God moved in some amazing ways. We had A.B. Simpson (well an actor posing as AB) speak to us about his experience with missions and God's call on his own life. Jason Ostrander (the CMA National Youth Director) then followed up with some great insight as to how God calls us.
After Jason spoke, Dr. Dave Thompson spoke about his calling, and how God was moving in Gabon. He challenged the kids to seek out what God is saying to them and their hearts. Jason followed up by asking who was hit by God this week. he asked for 2 groups. The first were those who God saved this week and the second were those whom God was calling into ministry.
The scene was powerful and many of our students stood up on the second piece saying that God was calling them into some sort of ministry. Lynne Bogolin wrote down all their names so we would know who all was saying they were being called.
We ended with communion and glow sticks. The communion was a way of connecting us as family and the glow sticks was just a flashy way of ending a GREAT week...if you go to the youtube page you'll see the glow sticks...6,500 people waving glow sticks does look pretty sweet!
Once we got back to the hotel, we debriefed a little bit, had small groups and went to bed. God has been doing so much in the lives of these teens and I get a front row ( and so do you now, with the blog!)!
Keep praying because we move hotels tomorrow and begin our run of service! Thanks for checking in and I will see you here tomorrow!
0 comments:
Post a Comment