Water, Fire, Wind

We got back to Aurora last night at 6:something.

NYC had its ups and its downs.
The worship with Starfield, the speakers, and the concerts were absolutely positively phenomenal. I've always loved Starfield, but I love them even more now. I ran out of money before I could buy a shirt, though. =]
The speakers included J.T. Warrik, Reggie Jabbs, and Greg Stier. Each night had a theme, water, fire, or wind, and they spoke of God in those elements. It was wonderful.
And the concerts. TobyMac and David Crowder Band were by far the best. Crowder only got like, 25 minutes, though, while TobyMac and Family Force 5 got around 45. That was disappointing, but he was still fabulous.
I had a lot of favorite parts, but one of them was on the last night, when the speaker, Francis Chan, finished speaking and left us in prayer. We were sitting on the floor then, and someone in the far left of the stadium began singing "I Surrender All" and it began to spread until everyone in the whole dome was singing the chorus without instruments or anything. It was beautiful.

There were two not-so-great things that stood out: the food and the tracks.
The food was atrocious. We ate the first day, Wednesday, for lunch (which wasn't very good) and then rushed after our tracks to beat the rush for dinner, got up to the front of the line, saw the food, and left. It literally looked like vomit thrown on some wilted lettuce. Ugh. So we didn't eat dinner there at all, but we toughed out lunch every day. Needless to say, we were very hungry at dinner time. (; The first day we ate at Quizno's and then Jimmy John's 3 nights in a row. It was very yummy.
The tracks were a new thing they tried at NYC07, and I don't think they'll do it again. We registered for them in March or something like that, and there were things like music, sports, photography, drawing, and graphic design. Everyone from our church chose the Multiple Topics, where we met in the Meal Hall for an hour and literally sat there doing nothing each time and then chose two seminars per day. There wasn't really an opportunity for service or variety so much, which was kind of a disappointment. We went to a couple good seminars though, so it wasn't all bad.

Then there were the buses. Oh, the buses. Our district got 2 charter buses from Coach USA to get us to and from St. Louis, and on our way there, the buses reached a temperature of 95 degrees because the air conditioning broke. It was miserable and smelly and gross, and they promised to fix them when we got to St. Louis. Well, they were sent to a shop, but I don't think they ever got "fixed" because on Sunday, when we left St. Louis and headed to Kansas to stop for the night, it reached irregular and uncomfortable temperatures once again, to the point where the district flew Elaine, who's 7 months pregnant, home to avoid any complications that could come as a result of the heat. They sent new buses that drove through the night from Colorado to us, and though it still got to 80 in the back of Bus 1, was considerably cooler and much more comfortable. Hallelujah.

The best thing about NYC, though, was the service project that we all took part in. Each student who attended NYC was asked to bring a box full of non-perishable food to the conference, in hopes of feeding 5,000 families of 4 for a whole week. That alone was amazing, but we ended up being able to feed 10,184 families! It was so really cool that 9,600 little teenagers could do that. (:

I'm still kind of letting all of NYC sink in. In some ways, it exceeded my expectations, and in others it fell short. But it was certainly fabulous in the way of encountering God, which I'm very thankful for.

Sorry I don't have much. =/
I'm sure there's some things I've left out, but I can't remember them right now. Haha.

Overall, I had a good time. I'm very glad I went, and for the most part I think it was worth the $1,300 we paid to get there.