WOW!  Another awesome day.  Right now I am hot and sweaty, but I will explain more later (I will tell you that it involves a mechanical bull).  Anyway…let’s get to our day.

We started out with First Word (devotions) at 9am lead by a group of college age students who did some mission work in India.  The topic of devotions and for the day dealt with truth.  We discussed what truth is and how do we know what is true.  There are so many people vying for our attention trying to tell us what they are saying is true.  But Jesus says that if you are in my Word you will know the Truth (with a capital "T") and the Truth will set you free (we are talking about Jesus here).  A good start to the morning.

At 10am we went to the celebration worship for the morning.  The band Foolish Things lead the praise and worship time again.  The Bible study leader then came up and lead us in a study about truth.  He emphasized that we need to be true to our selves and to be bold if we are going to live recklessly for Jesus.  Ken Davis took the stage again and got us laughing one minute and near tears the next then back to laughing all the while driving home the point of Jesus’ reckless truth that he loves us.  Wow…what a way to slap us in the face with a basic truth like that.

At 11:30 we were sent into smaller groups to talk about missional youth ministry.  Here we learned how the church is making Jesus vague and that we really don’t like talking about Jesus like we should.  We know the basic words and phrases; but the real question is: Why do you believe in Jesus and why does it matter?  The kids were challenged to make a difference in their churches.

After a McDonald’s lunch we went to various workshops.  The kids learned a variety of things that they shared with the group when we had devotions tonight.  I am really impressed at how much they are learning.  They are definitely here for a reason.

For supper we walked a couple blocks to a place called Demos (pronounced with a long "e").  This is an awesome steak and spaghetti place.  We definitely got plenty to eat.  Afterwards we went back to the convention center to the Fun Youth House.  We had about 2 hours to burn before our evening session so we decided to have some fun.  They had a bunch of inflatable games such as a Velcro wall, an obstacle course and bungee cord run.  But my favorite thing was the mechanical bull.  That was hard to pass up.  Trevon got on and set the bar.  At first I struggled and soon gave it up.  But Trevon kept setting the bar higher so I had to try again.  Trevon’s record was 18 seconds and he was quite proud of it.  So I got on and had a good ride…I hit 24 seconds.  Of course I had to rub that in (but in a loving way). And of course Trevon could not let that set so he tried a couple more times but could only score 24 seconds.  I guess we will have to settle for a tie (for now).

Our evening session had more praise and music before our new speaker for the evening.  It was Miss Virginia 2002 and she talked about the three pillars of truth:  God’s love, God’s strength and God’s vision.  She drove home how Satan feeds us lies to try to topple these pillars, but she exposed these lies to give us strength against Satan’s attacks.

After our session we returned to our hotel for devotions and then off to bed.  Tomorrow we are participating in a service project.  I will tell more about that tomorrow.  Thanks again for your prayers and God bless.  -EDH-