Acquire The Fire 2007

Wow! What a weekend! God showed up and it was AWESOME!!! First, for those who are unfamiliar with Acquire The Fire (aka: ATF), it is a youth conference held every year in the Houston area. It is run by Teen Mania ministries which is led by founder and president, Ron Luce. The principle purpose of ATF is to challenge and inspire young people of this generation to rise up within their generation and be great young men and women of God. It challenges students to go deep with their relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and to accomplish great things for His Name and His glory; and by doing so, live radically different from their worldly counterparts. To go against what the popular culture is teaching them about life, money, sex, power, and self, and to instead, base their existence upon the principles and values taught by God in the Bible. (You can check out the link called "BattleCry" over in the sidebar of this blog if you are interested in learning more)
That said, let me tell you about a couple of things I found to be extra cool that God did for us this weekend.

• 1st and foremost, this weekend recharged our "spiritual batteries." Both students and leaders were challenged to continue to grow in our relationship with the Jesus. We all learned more about how the culture today tries to convince us that we need worldly things in order to "be cool" or to feel good about ourselves and how God in His Word says that those things that the world offers may be fun for a while, but in the end we are left empty and damaged on the inside.
• 2nd, God did a miracle for us which I feel that I have to give witness to because it was so awesome. The weather-guessers had been saying for days that Saturday was going to be rainy all day... and let me tell you that morning when we drove from where we were staying overnight to the convention, it was miserably dark and raining. Well, we had packed a picnic lunch to eat in the parking lot that day. So I had been praying and had asked a lot of others to be praying as well, that God in His power would clear the skies and that perhaps even give us some sunshine as well during the period of 11:30am until 2:00pm so that we could have an enjoyable lunch. Well HE DID IT! It was beautiful! It was a little cloudy when we first went out there at noon and within the first 15 mins the sun started to come out and by the end of lunch there was barely a cloud in the sky. PERFECT! What a wonderful and powerful God we serve! We praise You Jesus!
  

• 3rd and lastly, all the pieces just fell into place. We had one extra person that signed up to go last minute and I was concerned about being able to get a ticket in the area where I had bought the other tickets. Well, we got one! I wasn't sure how the transportation was going to work out with the number of people going. That too worked out perfectly. I needed to provide food and beverage for all of us and so I had made a request at church concerning our needs and 4 wonderful ladies from the church stepped up to the plate and provided a wonderful feast for us at each of the meal times! (we even had leftovers after everyone was full).

Overall, it was just a fantastic weekend... the speakers, musicians, performers, and event volunteers were great. Above all else, I believe God was glorified in it all, and that makes for a FABULOUS weekend!

Below I've included a couple of pictures from the event... enjoy!

hanging out between sessions

Becca the beautiful!

the other end of our row just chillin' between sessions

Hard core RED fans

RED in concert!

RED's lead singer on the big screen