8,000

This weekend my friend and I and a few girls from the youth group went to the Revolve Tour.  It is a conference for teen girls in 6th to 12th grade.  It was a lot of screaming and high pitched fervor.  Bands played, speakers preached.  I barely knew any of the speakers or performers... and they were mostly crazy!

There were some tender moments, too.  Like when the 14 year old boy spoke about how when he was 9, he watched a movie about the mass of orphaned children in Uganda, parents having died of AIDS. And he thought he must help.  So, he went on to found "Hoops of Hope" and raised enough money to build a hospital and a school in a village in Uganda.  One boy changing the world.

Or when all 8,000 sweet little voices were singing together:

"This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held"

...8,000 teenagers singing together and giving God all the pain in their life.  The singer quieted her voice, was barely singing, and the whole arena was alive with song, resting in the arms of love.  It was beyond beautiful.

And my ears are still ringing, especially because I came home to 4 screaming little girls and a new bird who apparently doesn't like the screaming because it always starts whistling when the girls start crying or yelling.  Wow!  That was a run-on.