Life Change

Wow. Incredible things have happened in the past few days at 3DYC. Our junior high speaker was okay, but Jon was the one who really had the holy spirit speak to me. The first night after session we had a small group time with just our church. Jon scared some people when he started telling us that we were get into, as he put it, really yucky stuff. He told us he was sick and tired of pretending and that a lot of the time that we are too. We all seem to be different people in the church than outside of it. We all act like everything is okay, our relationship with God is as good as we would like it, and we don't have any problems that need prayer. Jon was near tears when he was stressing that our relationship with our saviour was a matter of Heaven and Hell; that we just had to STOP PRETENDING. When he finished his lil "mini sermon" he told us we were all going to get in a circle and pray. That's when the holy spirit exploded into action. There were prayers of change, hope, healing, and praise. For me that time was peak of many spiritual battles. All glory to God, He won 'em all. When that was finished we all gathered around Jayla Fehr and prayed like crazy over her for a healing of her chrones disease. By the time we were done I didn't see a single person that wasn't in tears, I know I was. Jon left us with the assignment to right a list of all the junk we wanted to change in our lives and the next night we would "take out the trash".

We all left and went to our rooms as people glanced at our tear streamed faces. The junior high boys met in Caleb's room for a short small groups time, then I wrote my "junk list", and went to bed... well, went to "floor" (there were five in our room and two beds).

I had an amazingly fun day the next day. I got pants by the floor when I was beating Albert at a jumping contest off the stairs. I have to admit, it was pretty hilarious. We took off our name tag things (that we absolutely need to have to go to session) and when we were done jumping we looked and, to our horror, our name tags were gone. We searched frantically for a while; then Samantha, Hanna, Jenna, and Kate came around the corner smiling from ear to ear, and it all just clicked. I knew for sure that they had them, and we wouldn't let them off the hook. We finally decided to let them go because I was sure of what they would do. As soon as they went back around the corner we charged after them, and sure enough, there were our name tags right where we left them. We were going to chase them down, but they hid in the women's restroom.

After the long day and many more exciting events (I'm too lazy to type all of them.) we had another small groups time with our church. We put all our junk lists in a pile in the middle of the floor as Jon read them off and we spent some time in the Word. After another "mini sermon" we went in smaller groups into seperate corners of the room (senior high guys, senior high girls, junior high boys, junior high girls). Caleb told us to pray about our "junk" and a now very close friend of mine shared some very disturbing things going on in his life with family and friends. My heart broke for him as we all gathered around him as he shared and we encouraged and prayed for him. I couldn't help but cry. We all went back to our rooms, once again getting glances from some people, and went to bed.

We all made attempts to wake up (I failed to twice, but third time's the charm.) and began to pack up. We had our final session, and got on the bus and began our trip back. That trip was very... um... interesting. Let's just say that my "buddy" is... well... still awesome :).