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OK OK… I promised details and it’s Friday now.. I’ve been too busy/lazy to update.  Here’s the dealy-o.

We left Friday night at 5pm…. We took my car, Ben‘s car, and Jen‘s mini-van.  8 of us piled in and set out for our 20 hour drive.  We had a radio in each vehicle to talk to each other… so that was fun.  I drove for 14.5 hours then traded off to Sarah around 7:30am.  I slept for 3 hours then finished the drive from 10:30am to 1:30pm.  We went down through Ohio to Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, then Texas.  It was the farthest I’ve been away from home and I STILL haven’t flown in a plane…. GRRR!  So we pulled in around 1:30ish and the registration didn’t start until 2 so we ate lunch at a place called “Watsonburger.”  It was a cheap rip off of McDonalds with the golden arches flipped upside-down and painted orange… It was funny cuz you knew you were in hick country when the gas stations change names/signs from “Get-n-Go” in plastic, to “Git-n-Scram” spray-painted on a piece of wood.  No… I’m not joking.

When we pulled up to register it was about 2:30 and the line was already backed up for a good half-mile.  We shut the cars off and got out to talk to the others in line.  The boys in front of us (Cory, Davy, and Chris) were from Atlanta.  We ended up camping next to them too which is hilarious cuz there were over 32,000 people camping across 100 acres.  Anywho, we played frisbee a bit and talked while the line was sitting still… eventually we started moving so we got back in the cars.  Then a man came to our car from the Passion group.  He was wearing a volunteer jacket and he asked if he could pray for the people in our car.  We told him “PSSH! NO!” and drove over his foot…. ….. … ok so maybe not.  He prayed for us and we went on to registration.  When we got through that we parked and started the 1/4 mile hike to our campsite with all our gear, and set up camp.

The first night was rocked by 7 waves of severe thunderstorms and high-winds.  Now you may have been in some pretty harsh storms in your life, but until you experience a storm in the tornado-belt of Oklahoma/Upper Texas… you haven’t seen a thing.  The first wave had us holding our walls in the tent and searching for leaks in the floor.  The guys had one tent (Troy, Matt, Andrew, and I), the girls had another (Sarah and Jen), and Ben and Lauren had their own…. (They’re married… oooooohhhh.)

When the first storm wave passed we heard a distress call from outside… The girl’s tent was collapsing…. …. HAHAHA… so we grabbed the closest thing we could find to rope…. Duct-Tape.  I spun some rope out of it and we tied down their tent a little more.  After the second wave hit the girls tent was toast.  It collapsed except for one side…. the side with Duct-Tape…   SO Jen and Sarah bunked with Lauren and Ben went to his car to sleep.  I went to sleep then.  I woke up after the third wave had passed… I was drenched. We had a lake in our tent.  My sleeping bag, clothes, luggage, pillow… all a sopping wet sponge.  I woke up Matt and had him dump the water that was gathering on the roof…. he in doing so dumped it on Troy and woke him up…. THAT was funny.  The three of us decided we were done and went to my car to sleep.  Andrew stuck it out (He had an air mattress and was 12 inches above the lake.)  About half-way to my car wave 4 hit.  HAHAHA… so here’s us 3 running with a dim flashlight in acres of cars…. FINALLY found mine and slept like a rock.

We evaluated damages the next morning… dried out the guys’ tent, dissassembled the girls’ tent, and watched hundreds of people do the same.  All my clothes and belongings (Bible, cell phone, palm pilot, pills, and toiletries) were soaked…. luckilly nothing was ruined… the clothes were all in need of drying, but the electronics all functioned and my pills were dry in their case.  But God had come in power that night… Welcome… to Texas.

Sunday was a day of speakers and worship.  We (Sarah, Ben, and I) went to a session taught by Matt Redman and Chris Tomlin about the “Heart of Worship.”  What it really means to worship.  It was cool and I think I took the most away from this session than any other.  They talked about how our lives are worship… that our bodies and our actions are what matter… the state of our hearts and minds… and that the physical act of singing songs has very little to do with it…  And coming from two of the most well-known worship leaders in the world, this was very cool to hear.

The downside to that event was sitting in the sun for 2 hours a good half mile from our campsite.  We fried like chicken.  That night was worship under the night sky… it was delayed in starting for a half hour because there were still cars backed up down the road trying to get through one of 26 lines of registration for 3 miles!  After a half hour they started regardless and we worshipped for an hour or so… Then a satellite link was made between the four individual gathering stages where we were located and the main stage in the center of the site.  Worship and speakers were then broadcast to all the individual sites from the main site so we all sang together and in unison… it was cool.  You could hear the other sites of thousands of voices from over the hills.  Fun stuff.

The next morning was “One-Day.”  I awoke inside my neighbor’s tent (The Atlanta guys bought a double-dome 8 man tent when theirs died in the storms.) where Andrew and I crashed… The girls were in the van, the other two guys in the “Please don’t rain” tent from the night before, and Ben and Lauren retreated to their waterproof Coleman tent.  We ran down to the one-day field which was no longer “off-limits” as it had been for 2 days.  It WAS blocked off and being prayed over and had scripture read from a tower called the “Word Tower” for 48 hours straight.  People had gathered to hear the Word and had watched the field be blessed by it as it was back in the Bible in the book of (I think this is it) Jeremiah…. It’s SOMEWHERE in there…  But it was a really cool thing regardless.  ANYWAY, we ran down there at 7:45am and planted chairs to claim a spot…. we were 1/3 of the way back…. at 7:45am….. WOW.  The event didn’t start until 10.  So I went back and got ready….. ate breakfast… Then we all gathered at 10 for the event.  The opening prayer was given by a guy that looked and sounded familiar…. It was the same guy that prayed for our car when we first arrived!  He was a local pastor that had been working closely with Passion to put on the event…. that’s cool… After 3 hours of sitting in the sun listening to speakers and singing, I was ready for a break so Sarah and I went back to the campsite and ate lunch and decided that the shade of our larger tent was better than the sun killing us.  We could hear the music and most speakers from there so we crashed for four hours… I slept for a couple… People came and went and asked how we were and stuff…. We were burnt… hahaha…

At 5 the event had ended and people came back and we packed up the campsite, loaded the cars, and went back for the final session from 7-11:30pm.  There was a lot of worship and a few speakers… Mostly worship.  Shane and Shane (a group of two punky lookin guys with accoustic guitars) played first…. beautiful stuff…. Then I forget the order, but Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Steve Fee, and David Crowder played through the night.  Louie Giglio (Passion Director) spoke for awhile… We sang everything from a 200 a.d. praise song with no music, to hymns, to passion choruses…. it wasn’t about style… It was about praising God with our voices and our hearts and minds… It was awesome.  The sun set behind the stage and the clouds were beautiful over the rolling green hills in the distance… A helicopter flew overhead gathering video footage… Rumor had it there were over 200,000 people there that day…. I think it was a bit much, but we’ll see when they finalize stuff…

During the music end of things, Steve Fee rocked the worship hard… David Crowder made us die laughing with a story about his song “All this for a King” which was still undergoing a name decision and was put to a vote on his website… the winning name was supposed to be a joke… but until further notice… he played us the worship song “Boot Scootin Boogey 2”.

We left monday night and stayed in a Hotel in Atoka, Oklahoma.  Sarah, Troy, and I went to get breakfast at a “Waffle Shoppe” which was almost a rip-off of “Waffle House”… Food and logo were the same but the look inside was that of a normal restaurant…  About 3am I got a shower and slept in a real bed.  Everyone left in the van and Ben’s car in the morning except Sarah and I.  We slept in for two more hours and then drove to her grandparent’s house in Bartlesville, OK.  We stayed the night there at her Dad’s parents’ house and they took us to dinner at the Golden Corral.  I installed a CD-Burner for her grandpa and he showed me all his wood-working stuff… it was cool.  In the morning he made us all breakfast (pancakes, bacon, sausage, and rolls…. mmmm…) and then we set out to leave.  At the last minute we found out that Sarah’s mom’s parents were back in town so we visited them for 45 min.  I found out that her mom’s dad wants to be a Wal-Mart greeter when he hits 90…. He was freakin hilarious… Then Sarah and I drove the 15 hours back.  We pulled in around 1am and parted ways in Perrysburg.  She went back to BG and I to Oregon… The trip…. was over.

Mood:  ::SIGH:: THAT WAS A LOT OF TYPING!