CIY day 2

CIY Move always goes by so fast.  I can't believe we just finished Tuesday and  there are only 3 full days left.  Today was a full day of amazing fun.  It started with breakfast, and then we went into a morning show session.  Apparently USA and Canada are at war here in Tennessee with the winner today being the USA.  I was pretty happy about that because I was sitting on the side of the auditorium that was designated USA.  I love winning.  

Our encounter speaker focused on sin.  It's a lot easier to focus on someone else's sin rather than on our own sin.  I don't know why it is like that but it probably has been for a long time.  Jesus spoke about this in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:1-5.  We continued this thought in D-Group.  One thing we did in D-group was take two wristbands and write down a sin or struggle on the back side of it and put the wristband on our wrists.  The bands were silver so they sort of looked like chains.  We were to leave the bands on all day to set up something pretty special that happened in the evening service tonight.  I will get to that later though.  

That was the morning and after lunch started some great sporting tournaments.  We had a basketball tournament which my team didn't fare so well.  We had a tough draw.  Out of the 32 teams we got the eventual runner-up in our second round game.  Darn the bad luck.  But our volleyball team was the runner up in the volleyball tournament.  Out of 30 teams they took 2nd!  Awesome!  I followed that up with some Ultimate frisbee with some new friends from Kentucky.  That brings us up to supper.  I had a corn dog and a pork chop.  It was the first time I've had that particular combination in my life.

After supper is our evening session.  Of course the worship was outstanding.  The new songs are becoming easier to sing because of the repetition and they are really excellent songs.  In between some songs we were instructed what we were to do with our bands that we put on in D-group.  The adults connected the bands with a third wristband and it connected our wrists together.  We continued singing with our wrists bound and we sat through the entire sermon bound by wristbands.  The significance of this is that we allow ourselves to be ensnared by our sin.  It can become what controls us.  But Jesus gave us a way out.  He gave us hope of something different.  The Hebrews in the Exodus were bound as slaves and God also delivered them.  In the same way he delivers us.  At one point we were to break free from the wristbands.  It was awesome to hear 1400 wristbands breaking throughout the auditorium.  

This led to some great discussion in our youth group time.  Some about sin, some about pain that people allow to control their lives.  Overall it was a very powerful day.  I hope it continues to impact as it did today.