1 of My Top 5 YM Experiences

This past weekend I took a group of about 60 High Schoolers to Magic Mtn for an Outreach Trip. It was a "Burnout" trip. We left at midnight on Fri night, drove all night, ate breakfast, got to magic mtn about 45min before the park opened at 10:30am, stayed at the park all day till it closed at 10pm, went to the hotel to get some sleep, woke up the next morning, had breakfast and a service before loading up and coming home...man, i am tired again just writting about it. hahaha

The couple of weeks leading up to this trip were kind of a roller coaster for me. Our numbers were WAY down and I was questioning if we should even do the trip. As I was praying for the trip I felt God tell me that numbers don't matter, He is going to bring the people He wants on this trip. So, even though I was hoping for like 80 students and at the time we only had like 30 I continued to move forward with planning. Then my admin assistant found like 20 registration forms that she had put in her desk and forgot about and then in the last week leading up to the trip we had a few more sign up to put us around 60 students.

With this being an outreach trip i told my "regulars" if all of you just come then this is a failure of a trip...invite people! And they did. Almost half of the kids that came were either brand new to the church or were visitors and most of those were not followers of Christ.

Sun morning while we were waiting to start our service a guy walks into the room next to us and I realize that I recognized him. He was some athlete but I couldn't remember who. After a little asking around of some of my kids we figured out that it was Marc Jackson (former Indiana Pacers star and current ESPN analyst). Turns out he pastors a church that meets in the room next to where we were gonna meet. It was cool to meet him and talk with him for a few minutes.
When it was time for our service we sang a few songs (unplugged) and I had 2 students share their testimonies before I got up to present the gospel. I don't know what I was expecting but when I gave the invitation 11 students prayed to accept the free gift that God offers to us through Jesus Christ!!!

One of the girls that came and accepted Christ told one of her friends "it was incredible, Michael said something like make eye contact with me to let me know that you wanna do this and I did and afterwards I had this really strange and good feeling that's what made me cry!"

Right when I got done with the closing prayer some music started coming from the room next door and it was a woman signing praises to God for like 2 minutes straight! It was as if her praises were the celebration of what just happened in our room. It was a glimpse of heaven's celebration after someone decides to follow Christ. It was powerful for me/us and I thank and praise God for allowing us that glimpse.