Sharing the Love of Christ

winter conference notes...
Each year our region with Crusade which is TX, Arkansas, OK, and LA has a Winter Conference for our students in the Dallas area. This year it was in a hotel on the Sundance Square in ft worth.
We sent out a whole prayer letter about the conference so I'm not going to detail it here. There was one thing not in the letter that I wanted to share that touched me, and I think will encourage you in sad but still encouraging way.
First off there was about 550 students in attendance which brought alot of energy to the morning and evening meetings. The speakers did a great job in my opinion, and the camera guys were flawless (camera guy was my job). The main things spoken on was forgiveness, prayer, and using your life as a ministry. The students were encouraged to not only seek and recieve forgiveness from the Lord, but to also forgive the hurts done to you by others. Also, they were encouraged to big meaningful prayer. Being in such a place during prayer where you could focus and know you are talking to God! They were also encouraged to pray with a big picture and to look beyond thier own life circumstances. Finally, they were encouraged to give thier future up to the Lord, and use whatever future they had to have a ministry.
Ok...so all of the talks were awesome but my point is this. When you walk into Church and look around everyone seems happy, in attendance, and pretty much like they have things together, or whatever. Well thats basically what you'd percieve from the student crowd at Winter Conference. A hyper bunch of kids with the world at thier finger tips and no cares at all.
Well during the last night's meeting we did something different. No speaker, just worship songs. The twist was that starting at the begining of the meeting the MC posed a few questions regarding what God was doing in thier lives with prayer, then a couple songs later about thier life plans, then a couple songs later about forgiveness, and the students would respond by texting in thier answers and those would then by streamed live on the screens in the room.
Let me tell you, the large group of happy students opened up, and deep hurt came rolling out. Students texted things like...
"i forgive my father for leaving, i've hated him for so long"
"i forgive my brother for the death or my other brother, i know its not his fault"
"i am praying for the man who sexually abused me"
"i am prayer that my campus would come to know the Lord"
"i need to forgive myself for what i did in iraq"
I promise i can go on and on just from memory.
I think that alot of people who are believers even, the person sitting next to you in church, your nieghbor, they all have deep wounds in thier lives that are being hidden by a front. I just think its important to be aware that the outer appearance its always what going on inside. But the Lord wants to heal those wounds and fill that void.