Day One almost to an end…

This morning our hotel along with some of the others all started out with freezing cold showers! Yay for 22,000 students in one city! Today was filled with great worship (including several songs in Spanish, Korean and an African language), dance, drama, time to visit the many exhibits, seminars and a morning and evening session.

Meet Olivia from Malawi (in Africa)…

In an exhibit by World Vision you could walk through the life of an African person infected with HIV using an audio player. It was a moment to be them and see what it would be like. Mine was the story of Olivia who was 17 years old. She was raped twice by the same man, infected with HIV, had two children, the second child was infected with HIV and all of this due to no fault of her own. Then the story went through the myths, stimgas and discrimination associated with an HIV infected person in such a culture. At the end of the “tour/story of her life” there was a “chapel” with many different pictures of both children and adults where some had a red mark on each person to show who had HIV or not- some had died from it already. Then there was a prayer wall for us to write out our prayers or encouragements that would be sent back to these people that are infected with HIV.

Cathy a Wall Street Journalist…

Then a few friends and I met a girl named Cathy! She was in one of the seminars we attended. She was interviewing us for an article that is going to be written for a newspaper. However, during our chat it became obvious that she most likely doesn’t have a relationship with Jesus. One AWESOME thing she said was that since she came from a Roman Catholic background the expression of worship is usually a bit more reserved. Except that at Urbana she said it seems like people here have more joy and contentment in what they believe… so pray she might find it for herself this week!

Lastly, tonight we had a man from Africa speak about the Global Church and how we are all apart of the body, needing each other. No is any better than anyone else in Christ! Then a lady spoke about Abram and how he said YES!! to God’s call - wherever it may be. Not to settle but to go wherever God calls you to go!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 9:41 am and is filed under Contributed Articles, Stories, Urbana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.