Fall Conference

This past weekend, I went on a retreat with InterVarsity called Vital Faith. It was a collection of all the InterVarsity chapters from Oregon meeting together to meet, play games, worship, and connect with God. It was amazing, and I had a life-changing experience there. The speaker, Doug Schaupp (who is an amazing speaker, by the way) talked about vital faith all weekend, and how we need to have "come and see" moments about God, where we are so excited excited about his love that we want to tell everyone around us. Using a few examples of things like this happening during his college days as an InterVarsity leader, he explained how college evangelism is getting harder as our generation becomes smarter and more skeptical of faith and God (I also bought his book about this, "I Once Was Lost." So far, it's excellent and eye-opening). Oddly enough, the small group that meets in my dorm (go Sackett Crew!!) had already planned a huge event for Monday night, where we'd get a whole bunch of people together for free pizza and cupcakes before our Bible study to bring people in. Some backstory on that:

[As a campus, the thing we're trying is called the "God Experiment," where every week for four weeks we try and bring God into our lives through a different aspect. this week is Curiosity, so we were trying to bring a BUNCH of people into Bible study who might have questions, no matter what their faith. This turned out well, as we were supposed to get together by school at the conference and plan some way we could spread the love of God on campus. And we had already planned this! God was at work, and it was good!]

We had a huge number of people show up to pizza, and had about 15 people stay after for Bible Study, bringing our Bible up to about 30 people. It was exciting!

Back to the conference:

On Saturday night, I realized something. This was like the big moment, when I realized I had gone off the path, and wanted to get back on. God loves me so much, no matter what i do, and I hadn't realized this until right bout then. During the song "How He Loves" by David Crowder, the chorus "he loves us, oh how he loves us, oh how he loves us, oh how he loves" kept repeating in my head, and I realized that he loved us (I know, obvious conclusion from the words, but this was the first time I had truly believed it). At the end of that, there was an option to recommit your life to Christ, and I felt like that was the right choice for me, so I stood up. It felt so good to place my trust in God, and put my life in his hands. I had been lost, but am on my way back to the right path.

Now, I realize that there are more extremes to "being off the path." I've all sorts of testimonies of how people have been in a downward spiral; of drugs, alcohol, and depression and God shown them the light and they are a better person now because of it. I never strayed that far, but I think that what I did was enough to warrant action by God to show me how far off I had been (read my first post about my testimony for more info).

SO, this is my come and see moment, my big event, the "day I'll always remember before and after" from. And it s exciting.

God is Good!