"10,000
Youth Gathered in One Stadium!"
That's what
the organizers told us at the beginning of the summer when they
enthusiastically invited us to teach 3 workshops during their
conference. And though their expectations turned out to be a bit
optimistic (I estimate there were about
1,000), as I look back on that day I realize how many things
went well that might not have, and I credit that to your prayers.
Things
that 
went
too well for it to just be coincidence:
* Instead
of just the two of us, we took along 4 members of our growing
team - Veronica and Jorge, who are columnists with our website,
and Nahum and Beto who are youth leaders in a local church. And
it ended up being an great team building time.
(note: put cursor over the photo
for more info)
* I felt like
I had a cold the day before the conference so I asked Nahum -
one of the local youth leaders we are discipling - to go with
us and help with my workshop. During my workshop I felt perfectly
fine, so maybe God used my cold to encourage me to involve
Nahum in the seminar.
* When 
we
invited Beto - another local youth leader who we've been training
- to go with us, he said he'd go if he woke up in time. I really
didn't think he would wake up because he had had a busy week,
it was late, and we were leaving the house at 7:30 am. But at
7:25 he showed up and told us that on waking up he said, "God,
if you want me to go let a car go by in the street." One
did. Being the mathematician/logician that he is, he said to himself,
"I probably heard the car and that's why I woke up, so God
if you really want me to go have a dog bark." One did. Still
not convinced he said, "OK, just one more thing, have one
of my parents get up to go to the bathroom." First he heard
his father, then his mother, so he got up. Going made him feel
more a part of our "team" and he even helped teach a
section of my workshop.
* Then there's
Jorge - a friend and one of the most gifted youth speakers I've
heard - but not one of the more punctual. You can't fully experience
Jorge until you've sweated out the anxious minutes before an event
wondering
if and when your star speaker will arrive, so it will have to
suffice to say that at 10:00 pm the night before the conference
I called him on his cell phone only to find that he and his darling
new wife, Zuraya, were watching a movie in a theatre in Cuernavaca,
2 1/2 hours away. He'd just finished speaking for 3 days at a
summer youth camp but promised he would make it to our house by
the 7:30 am departure time the next morning. Since we figured
he wouldn't, I gave him directions to the stadium and begged him
to show up. He didn't appear by departure hour so we left hoping
he'd catch up to us at the conference. But since we left
on time and only arrived 30 minutes or so before the workshops
began, we were already making arrangements to cover his seminar
without him, but at the exact moment when the sessions were beginning
he walked in! Afterwards he told us that he'd driven the nearly
180 miles to the conference at around 100 miles per hour to arrive
on time.
* And of course
we never take for granted the safety that God has continued to
give us through many miles on the road!
So even though
there were not the 10,000 youth that the organizers had hoped
for, we were able to have contact with a number of people in an
area where we had not had any previous contact and we pray that
they will use the materials and be helped by them.
