i'm having a hard time...i don't know how to do justice in describing what urbana was like. how do you describe what it's like to worship alongside 20,000 other believers in a huge stadium that's shaped like a spaceship (or, as it was dubbed by the emcee during this year's conference, a giant wok...he proceeded to explain that God was stir-frying us to perfection...and another speaker towards the end of the conference said that there were two words that came to him while he was preparing his message...take...out...and he thought, "yes, Lord, i need to tell them to take out the gospel, etc., etc"...but, no...and he brought up a doggy bag and told us that we needed to be "take-out"...i guess you had to be there-his delivery was really good...anyways, look at the pictures on-line if you don't understand)?
the first day was actually a hard one. so there are 20,000 people trying to register and get to their dorm rooms and all...of course it's gonna be hard. i waited in line after line after line...by God's providence, susan choo and i both had flights to o'hare airport about one hour apart (totally unplanned), so i just met her there and we bused to campus together...if i hadn't met up with her, i would have gone crazy...basically, after you get off the bus, they herd you into what's called stock pavilion...which looks like a indoor rodeo...there's a dirt floor with wood chips, and it's called stock pavilion, so you can only imagine what it was like...you drop off your luggage and go to another building to register...without going into too much detail, it was chaos. that, coupled with my lack of sleep, made me wonder more than once what i was doing there...but after the first service, it was all good...
i guess i could tell you what our schedule was like...each day, we woke up and had personal devotional time, then breakfast, small group devotional, and morning service. after that, we had lunch and the rest of the afternoon was spent going to seminars (there were about 100 or more one-hour seminars available, and you could take a maximum of three seminars per afternoon) or checking out missions organizations. then we had dinner and evening service, followed by small group prayer time. all in all, it's a pretty packed schedule...and it's all about missions...
wow, i've written a lot, and i haven't even gotten to the meat-and-potatoes of it...i'll have to save that for another time.