Urbana pt 2

Today I felt a major breakthrough, in terms of figuring out what God wanted me to do. The pieces finally started to come together, through the people I met, through scriptures, and through what I felt was God's speaking to me.

There was a speaker who said that to confirm a calling you need 3 things: Confirmation from scriptures, confirmation from the Spirit, and confirmation from friends/family. I felt that all those came together for me yesterday, through prayer, readings, and through people I interacted with.

The schedule finally allowed us for some free time and that allowed me to go into the Global Connexxions area to visit all of the mission agency booths and theological seminary booths. As I wandered through the 350+ booths, I realized something rather disheartening and yet exciting. I spoke to many mission agencies. There were tons of them, covering the globe from Asia to Africa to Europe to North and South America. Urban ministries, tribal, unreached people groups, bible translations, business as missions. There was even an army booth, and aviation ministries, engineering, english teaching, radio, even internet ministries. Out of the 200+ agencies I walked past or spoke with, there was only 1, yes ONE Native North American missions agency. Talk about a forgotten people.

I spent a good 20 minutes talking to that one agency, and accidentally conveyed the idea that we were looking for an agency to send us, which certainly isn't the case. What I was really trying to do was find some ideas as to how they handled longer-term solutions for the reserves, but instead they thought I was volunteering our team for their ministry. Talk about a big misunderstanding, but I figure that as they send me more information, I can just use that information and share it with our church.

I kind of felt that because this was my second Urbana, I wouldn't get caught up in all of the emotions and grandeur of worship. I don't think you know what it means to worship in unity until you've attended a worship session in a size as large as the Urbana venue. The sheer magnitude of it is awe-inspiring. Picture the Air Canada Centre full of 20,000 happy, jubilant Raptor fans cheering for the Raptors as they just won an NBA Championship, or similarly, a Leafs game of the same -- actually we Leaf fans have suffered enough, let's just stick with the Leafs victory and just imagine how crazy the fans were. That's kind of what it was like today in worship at Urbana, only instead of Leafs we were cheering for God, and instead of 20,000, it was 22,250.

I was noticing that it felt like all the delegates had let go of their inhibitions and were fully worshipping God with not just their voices but their arms and body language. It's like people finally let go of their inhibitions, casting all there crowns upon Him. It's an amazing thing, when everyone does it all at once.