Transformed Update

Wow! How do you put it into words when your favorite youth convention – that you’ve already hyped up in years past as “the best” – overrides any other past experience and somehow goes to the next level in “awesomeness”?!

Seventeen of us went to the Transformed Youth Convention this weekend and seventeen of us came back completely fired up and ready to take over the world! God did some major re-working in a lot of our lives this weekend. I heard several amazing testimonies in our group gatherings, experienced God in crazy, loud, and exuberantly passionate worship times, and cried tears of joy with students as God ministered directly to us at the altar. Wow! What more can I say? I really don’t have the words… that seems to be happening a lot lately. (smile)

On a side note, pics from the Transformed Convention have been posted to our brand new Facebook Group. If you don’t have a Facebook account (it’s a social networking site), now is the time to join! It’s a great place (further removed from the negative ad content found on sites like MySpace) to connect with friends. You can also view our trip pics and get an embeddable slideshow for your personal web site or blog at Picasa. Here’s the video highlights on YouTube:

Sunday night was great, too. When the worship started, four of our teens picked up the flags and went at it – three of them were young men! Whoa! Then, Pastor Tani asks an “on fire student who just came back from convention” to lead in the opening prayer after the first song. There was a little hesitation, but then every student present (6 or 7 of them – two already on the worship team) walked up to the stage at the same time and proceeded to pray over the service. By that time, Deanna and I, and it looked like a lot of others in the place, were tearing up. They went back and worshipped on the stage, at the congas, and with the flags for the rest of the worship service.

Our Catalyst Discipleship time continued, too, with the second part of the “Starving Jesus” documentary. We were dealing with some audio issues so we had to watch the video ninja-movie-style (the audio wasn’t lined up with the video), but it didn’t detract from the powerful message.

All of this leads up to next week’s Youth-led Sunday morning service. I hope all of you will be there. We’ve been working on getting ready for a couple months now and God has really been doing a lot of transformation on us in the meanwhile. I’m really expecting God to use our students in a life-changing way this weekend. You definitely will not want to miss this!