i hope your summer has been amazing so far.
it's almost august. WUT?
my summer has been a blur. a very busy blur.
there was one event that took up a good chunk of my time. i worked with my team for the past 14 months to put on an event on the national mall. it was called together 2016. it was a gathering calling a million people to the mall, the only agenda was Jesus.
pretty rad.
i arrived in DC a week before the event to finish getting all of my ducks in a row.
as the week wore on, the temperature climbed higher and higher.
by the time we got to saturday we knew we were in for a scorcher.
the day dawned a sticky 80-something degrees with the promise of reaching triple digits. after a quick breakfast and short team meeting i set off to the far side of washington monument to the volunteer tent, my home for the day.
in a matter of minutes i had volunteers arriving to help. the next four hours went in a blink. there were stressful moments, there were laughs, there was a lot of sweat, and there were a whole lot of people who had turned up to worship Jesus. then things took a bit of a turn. as we were approaching midday there seemed to be a steady stream of people who ended up in the volunteer tent in a vain effort to cool off; sitting by the fans, grabbing ice from the coolers for the back of their necks and looking about one minute away from passing out or throwing up.
now the volunteer tent was quite removed from the main area of the gathering so i was missing out on pretty much everything that was happening on the other side of the monument. i've seen footage and it's incredible. at one point the whole crowd is down on their knees in silence in prayer. another point the mall is shaking in worship. artists and speakers were crying onstage as they felt the holy spirit move.
it.was.insane.
being removed i also missed the fact that people were overwhelming the medical tents onsite. hundreds of people were flocking to the tents in hopes of finding some respite from the intense heat and some cold water before they fainted. the few people i had huddled in the volunteer tent were a fraction of the masses in the other tents. the tent that we had set up for our partners was even opened up for those struggling with the temps as an oasis to cool off.
and then we got the news. they were shutting the event down early. the national parks service said the heat was too much and for safety reasons we were not allowed to continue.
so we shut it down. 5 hours early.
not our plan. not what we wanted. not how the day was supposed to go.
but there was so much beauty in that day it almost didn't matter.
there was a commissioning video shown before people left the mall. it was never about coming to the mall. it was always about going from the mall.
so grateful to be a part of this.
xo
