My goodness.

God

good!

Seriously. I don’t even know why I ever am surprised by how good He is! God’s our Father who loves us dearly, obviously He’s going to pour out his love in crazy amounts.

For those of you who don’t know…we had a conference for girls in grades 6-12 at my church this past weekend. It’s called ILLUMINATE and this year was our third year doing it.

A huge, huge part of my heart is to see teen girls find their identity in Christ and live out God’s purpose! My teenage years were crappy. Like a lot of people, I had no idea who I was. I had no meaning to my life. I partied because it’s what everyone else did. I gossiped. I hurt others. I hurt myself. I was a brat. I was selfish. I didn’t treat my body with respect. I felt empty on the inside. The list could go on and on and on.

I wish I had a youth leader who saw potential in me, who prayed for me, who encouraged me, who helped me discover that I had value, who told me I could make a difference, who told me there was a God in Heaven who LOVED me and had a plan for me….

I don’t blame anyone but myself for past mistakes but I’m going to do whatever it takes to prevent teens going through hurts that I had to go though. That’s why I’m so passionate about teen girls. It’s stupid hard in high school (and middle school).

So basically Illuminate is a 2-day conference packed with three main sessions (worship & speaking), breakout sessions (covering different topics), moG panel (getting guys perspectives on different questions!) & more.

We like to go all out and really dazzle these girls. Let me tell you about the ending… Our band busts out this amazing song they wrote (folk/pop goodness) and near the end, lights drop then BOOM 60 GIANT (3-foot wide) balloons fall from the ceiling. Pure goodness. Smiles all round.

We had almost 200 girls & leaders there. And man, did God ever move in their hearts. We had an AMAZING TEAM who served so faithfully and most importantly, so prayerfully. I’m honoured to serve under amazing leaders who place such a high value on prayer. God listens and answers prayer!! God moves because of prayer! The pre-service prayer times we had were powerful, powerful times where we could feel the Spirit heavily at work. I am so thankful for the guy leaders who spent the main sessions praying for the girls. How cool is that!?!

My favourite moment of the conference was during worship on the final session. The girls were singing Hillsong’s, The Stand. The worship team had stopped singing and the girls continued to sing. Listening to their beautiful voices surrendering their hearts to Jesus, just made my heart sparkle to the moon and back. God showed me His heart sparkling over them, I only caught the tiniest of glimpses and that was bigger than I could ever imagine. Ah, how the Father loves his daughters. What a blessing and a privilege to be a small part of what He’s doing. He is so good.