We Rocked the Dome

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I'm not sure I can sum Passion 2012 into words. It was completely unbelievable, incredible and mind-boggling. I've never been in a room with 45,000 students who desperately love the Lord. When our voices were raised, you could hear us outside the dome. One of the Passion head-honchos, Louie Giglio, said, "I thought foot-ball games were loud." When we sang, I couldn't hear myself. I was sing-yelling (which sounded terrible, but I didn't care) and I STILL couldn't hear myself. We sat in the nose-bleed section a lot and when you looked down over the people, hands were raised all across the stadium and everyone was singing.

Speaking of singing, Lecrae, Chris Tomlin, David Crowder, Kristian Stanfill, Hillsong United, Charlie Hall, Christy Nockels, and Matthew Redman led the worship. Talk about great singing.

Speaking wise, Francis Chan, John Piper, Beth Moore, Louie Giglio, and Christine Caine spoke. Amazing sermons! Man, God did some fabulous things in my life - which I can't wait to tell you about.

Wanna know how Passion worked? I'll give you the lowdown. The day started pretty early in the morning. We had to walk about 20 minutes from our hotel to the dome, so we had to leave the hotel at 8:30 each morning. Both nights we didn't get back to the hotel until after one o'clock a.m. and then didn't get to sleep until about 2-ish. Then, we embraced the rising sun and got up early. Over the three nights, I got about 13 hours of sleep. Was it worth it? Completely.

A day went like this, eat breakfast and get out of hotel by 8:30. Walk to community group sessions. Go to first meeting. Eat lunch. Go to second meeting. Have free time and eat dinner - getting food was like an all evening thing since every food place in Atlanta was packed. The final session started at 7:00pm. Another community group meeting at 9:00pm. Late night concert at 11:15. Run back to hotel and then drop into bed in severe exhaustion at around 2:00am. Best schedule ever!

Neon Blue!

The community group meetings were really fun. Everyone at Passion got these colorful wristbands that identified what community they belonged in. So, each community group has about 1,700 people in it which is then broken into even smaller communities of about eight people - called Families! Our group - as in the people we came to Passion with - had thirteen people in it and we all got different colors. I was in the Neon Blue Community with Kaitlyn, Justin and Phillip and MAN did we have fun.

The crowds were annoying at times, but it wouldn't have been the same without it! At times, I literally had to squish my way through people. It was cool though. I mean, thinking, "Wow, all of these people are here for God!" is neat. One time, I got stopped at the gate of the Dome and a security guard made me open like every pocket in my backpack and it separated me from the rest of the group for about 6 or 7 minutes. I was only 30 seconds behind them and I wouldn't have known it cause of all the people. Haha.

 

Okay, so now some pictures. :) First off, the group I traveled with was fantastic. I love ALL of them! They made me laugh and actually turned out to be pretty good friends - considering that I didn't really know any of them.

Seemed like we always ate on the floor. We ate Chick-fil-a on the floor of a food court. Interesting experience it was.

Kaitlin matching the hand.

Chick-fil-A

The Hand

 

Okay. I LOVE this picture. It says so much. Jordan, Justin and Phil are just doing there own thing and Brian is being Brian. Look at him. He is wearing a backpack backwards and smiling it up. WOW.

 

All the ladies. I love these gals.

 

So, there were these prayer cards that everyone got and each one had a differnt time on it. Mine said 11:17 am. When that time came I had to stop what I was doing and pray for slavery to end. And when you were done, you would take the sticker on that prayer card and stick it to a big black letter somewhere in the Georgia Dome. It was pretty cool. There ended up being TONS of stickers on all these huge black letters all around the place. It was pretty epic. Becca took this picture. It's nice.

 

Phil, Brian and I sticking on our stickers. 

 

I love these people. This is a shout out to Kaylin, Jordan, Becca, Brian, Phillip, Mary Elizabeth, Ansley, Caleb, Justin, Rich, Maria, and Kaitlin. Thank you SO MUCH for making my week SO incredible. I found friends in all of you. 

 

Random pictures that turned out quite well. We took them in the middle of a crowd, which is pretty hard. Lol.