World mandate Friday night

I need some time to fully process it all, but here's the bottom line. Every year the world mandate conference seeks to highlight a handful of unreached people groups and encourage churches to pick one and focus their outreach efforts.

It was a good night of worship, although I will say that only knowing one of the songs felt a little odd. Not bad, just odd.

The speaker was Jimmy Seibert. He is the senior pastor from Antioch Church in Waco. He talked about his recent experiences in Haiti and also other places around the world he has visited. He challenged us to run to pain. He said that Americans love the easy life. We hide from and ignore pain. While we are busy entertaining ourselves people are dying without hope.

I don't know that I heard anything new tonight. But at the end of the service, Jimmy asked people who felt called to go to come forward if they wanted prayer. So I went. It was strange to be on the receiving end of an altar call.

The aisles were crowded and they quickly ran out of counselors. I turned to walk away because I did not have to have prayer, I was not upset, I just felt urged to move. As I was turning, a woman stepped from the aisle. She said, "I am a lifegroup leader and I saw you and God told me to pray for you." I explained who I was and how our church is seeking to adopt an unreached people group. I asked her to pray that I would have wisdom and discernment about this. Very calm, cool, and collected. Then she began to pray. She prayed about the things I had said and then she prayed about all the things I had not said. The fear of being inadequate for the task, the fear of screwing it up, the fear of missing my big opportunity to chase God, my lack of knowledge of where I can get adequate training for the big vision. Calm, cool, and collected left me at that point.

Last point - tonight as I walked through the displays about the nations, two struck my eye. One was "let it rain" the other was "beauty from ashes". Both are phrases that define me, that I use often, and basically assumed I had copyrights on (just kidding). Interesting to see those two phrases in booths next to each other.