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Congregational Life Youth Ministry

ELCA Youth Gathering – Day 3

From Clara Johnston

Yesterday was an awesome day at the youth gathering! The first thing we did was went to lunch under our hotel in tunnels that have access to the whole city. When we went, I was in a small group, and we went to lunch at a Mexican place. When we were eating, a man showed up, and he asked for someone to buy him food. Pastor David immediately got up without hesitation and let the man get whatever he wanted to get. There was definitely some God in him yesterday!

After lunch, we had Synod Day, when we get to see people from all across Virginia, and from all of our other youth events. During Synod Day, we did lots of team building activities, listened to many stories, and of course sang lots of songs about God! It was a lot of fun and it was really nice to see friends from our state!

Afterward, we stayed in the hotel for a few hours and just hung out. Then, we went to an early dinner of Tex-Mex food, which was really good! Next, we headed toward the trains so that we could go to the Mass Gathering of over 31,000 people! It’s really crazy how many people have come to this life-changing event!

Mass Gathering yesterday was life-changing! Our speakers yesterday talked about many topics that most people would probably not expect to hear at a youth event. We listened to someone who is dealing with Mitochondrial disease, someone who did self-harm at some point in his life, and someone who was even a bully at some point in their life. Some of these stories were really sad, but they were healing, because God was with them. Overall, Friday was a really awesome, and life-changing day.

Oh and I would like to give a special thanks to the whole congregation and anyone who has helped us on our journey! Without all of you, we would not be here, but because of all of the support the church continues to give, we are able to do really cool things like this! Thank you so much, and I can’t wait to tell more about the trip when we get back!

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