Sacrifice

As usual this post is late.


Last week we had our Banquet for Young Life here in ACo.  It was a great night.  It always amazes me how close to 500 people in ACO show up for a Banquet?  I love how God amazes us daily and says, yeah that's me.  There are just things that happen and God reminds us of His control, well Banquet is one of those.  Also leading up to banquet.
As most of you that know me can attest to the fact that I was a mess about making a video for our banquet weeks before the banquet.  Well, the day before the banquet my friend, Jenn, (who was helping me make the video and practically doing all of it :)) and I had the video done.  It looked awesome, we were so excited about it.  It gave me chills and made me tear up every time I watched it.  Yup just what you want in a good video.  Well for reasons that we will not go into video got deleted.  I know I said it the ENTIRE video, got deleted a DAY before the banquet.  
AHHHHH, what a frustrating thing.  At that point I was going to scratch the whole thing, just like well God must not want us to have a video for the banquet.  Well my very determined friend Jenn said, no lets fix it.  So we had about 1/4 of the footage from the beginning and the stuff we were missing we re-filmed that afternoon.  Yup, we re-filmed 3/4 of the video (3 weeks worth of filming in 3 hours).  
That entire afternoon Jenn and I were trying to figure out why the heck this happened.  Jenn had put so many hard hours into this in her videography class at Williams and we were like WHY would it get deleted?  Jenn was also the one who was going to share her amazing testimony at the Banquet the next night.  
Well after we had re-filmed everything and frantically called all of our leader friends and asked them to either come film an interview very quickly or to go and do contact work, Jenn and I got into my car on our way to crank out the video.  Jenn turned to me and said ok, why did this happen Crystie.  Well I tried to babble out some excuse as to, "God wanted us to turn to Him," or "We had to trust Him more."  Not really knowing what I was saying but wanting my high school friend to see Jesus in this situation.  She then stops me and my babbling and says, "Nope, I know why this happened."  She then went on to say God wanted us to see the friends that sprinted to help us out when we called help.  She said we got to see friends sacrifice their "off" night because we asked for help.  We were able to finish the video not because we are good at this, but because our friends came to help.  Whether it was a friend getting re-interviewed, them showing up at a basketball game, going to yo zone with girls, or encouraging text messages, they fled to help!  I sat there jaw to the floor because that was so true and such a beautiful thing.
Jenn, a girl who came to know Jesus at camp a couple of years ago, and a girl who has struggled to find believers walking with her, was able to see a beautiful picture of community and to see that God has given her that community.  
Something else I was thinking about was the fact that Jenn was about to share her beautiful story of CHrist's redemption in front of 500 people the next night.  Some believers and some not; hearts were going to be touched by waht Christ has done in her life.  The enemy wanted to bring Jenn's spirits down.  He wanted her to be stressed and frustrated with Christ that night, he wanted to get in the way of her story, BUT HE DIDN'T!!!!  She was able to stand in the midst of that frustrations and see Christ's beauty!  I love that, Throw that in the enemy's face!  Jenn stood up at the Banquet and proudly and confidently shared how God has changed her life.  It was beautiful and there wasn't a dry eye in the place!  YAY!!  Christ won- as He does, but we got to experience that victory!  
I am so glad that I got to be with Jenn that night and was able to see her go through this process and also challenge my heart along with it.  We have things pop up in our lives and things like this video being deleted could have thrown me into crazy stress mode, but God simply took it and showed us this beautiful community.  I am so blessed to have people in my life that would run and pray when I call help!  That is what Christ does to us, just as He lifted Peter out of the water when Peter cried HELP!  He does the same with us-- and this community was His way that night!


AHHHH Jesus is so great!  


Here is a picture of my dear friend Jenn- She is awesome!