Disciple NOW 2007

I had the privilege and opportunity to go down to Sarasota this weekend to serve at Disciple Now. It was around 600 middle and high school students, 200 volunteers from 16 different churches in that area. It's rare these days that you can get different denominations together to worship our one God! I got the privilege to meet Kristian Stanfill and his band Tim, Matt, & Joe. (side note: the crazy thing was that one of the guys in the band, his wife went to high school with me and had my mom as a teacher. Pretty crazy huh? Well I guess not for me, though I did go down there to NOT see anyone I knew :) They were funny guys, full of lots of energy & laughter. I don't think there was ever a dull moment in the break room. I remember one time I was getting ready to walk out the door, and a piece of candy hit the wall right where I was standing. I turned around and 2 of the guys were pointing at each other trying to blame the other. Anyways, I just gave them a weird look, smiled and walked out the door. BUT when I turned back around there was Kristian throwing a bowl of candy onto Tim and they both were smiling at me. They were awesome! The speaker Stuart Hall was absolutely amazing. One of the best speakers I have heard outside of Sovereign Grace. Full of funny sounds, stories and jokes but then knew how to get right to the point and draw the students in. He actually used the word sanctification in His message. I thought I was going to fall out of my chair. I will share more of what the Lord taught me through the music and message in another post. (There was also a guy named Joe, if you want the funny stories about him you will just have to ask me :o) It was so wonderful to be at another camp, another church and to come up with ideas for future events. For example, I liked to see how we would do this one ( I think someone had some inside connections to abc) but the planning team asked all the youth pastors to send in a story of one child in their youth group that has been through a lot but continued to have faith. So they picked 3 top stories and surprised the girls with a helicopter ride around Sarasota area. Pretty amazing huh? There were a lot of things that happened this weekend that I thought either they have lots of money or someone has major connections. Needless to say, I am exhausted but I would have not traded this weekend for anything. You probably would have not know, but even though I was excited about going there was a lot of me that was scared to go for different reasons, but I wasn't about ready to tell anyone that. I had a BLAST, but most of all just thankful for the few things that the Lord taught me and most of all how there were multitude of opportunities to work on different areas and sins in my life. For example: TRUST, wanting to be in Control, my pride, jealousy, etc. Like the speaker this morning said we must continue to work for those. Put off, put on. We can't just turn on the light switch and expect everything to back to normal. Which is what I think way to often. Well that is all for today. I am off to bed. Goodnight :o)