In late December, 72 teenagers, mostly from the Great Lakes-Gulf Presbytery, gathered in Lafayette, Ind. for Winter Conference 2000. It was a time for “Renewing Your Passion for God,” the theme of the conference, for deepening friend ships, for making new friends, and for having a great time.

Pastor Dave Long from the Lafayette, intl., RPC was the speaker. He gave four messages showing us ways we could renew our passion for God.

During the first message, he defined good passion as a desire controlled by wisdom that does not get in the way of our relationship with God.

The second message was “A Passion for Intimacy with God.” During this message, Pastor Long showed us the importance of daily time with God. A quote that stood out to me was, “It is impossible to enter into the presence of God and come away unchanged.” This showed me that when I really seek to he in Gods presence. He will change my life to make it more pleasing to Him.

The third message was “A Passion for Prayer.” This was the most meaningful message for me. I have heard my whole life that prayer is an important part of the Christian life, hut how important had never been as clear before this message. Pastor Long gave us about 10 verses on reasons to pray. These showed me that we get all we need in the Christian life through prayer; everything from being delivered from temptation to having peace in life. My main application from this conference was to start spending a lot more time in daily prayer.

The last message was “A Passion for People.” Pastor Long showed us how true biblical fellowship brings glory to God and helps us in our daily walk with God. My application from this message was to talk about God and what I had learned in my quiet time that week with my Christian friends, rather then just talking about my activities.

One of the activities we have every year is the stress challenge. This year we did the “Iron Will” stress challenge. We were divided into eight teams. Each team was given a sled that a member of the team had to ride in while holding onto two ropes that the rest of the team pulled over a four-mile section of trail. That would not have been had, except that there were about six inches of snow on the ground.

Along the way there were different challenges we had to overcome. The first challenge was getting six people onto a foot square piece of cardboard in ten minutes. My team was not able to meet that challenge.

About a quarter mile into the hike, we came to the thin-ice challenge. In this challenge, the whole team had to move across the “thin ice,” which was really a field. However, only two feet could be on the ice at a time, and three people had to go over on each trip, and two people on each trip back. So we had to put two people on someone’s back, and he had to carry them over. Then the lightest person would he carried back. It was difficult, but we overcame this challenge with teamwork and communication.

Then we walked for what seemed like an eternity and prepared for what would be the final challenge.

We broke up into pairs. One person in each pair was blindfolded and the other person had to hop on one leg back wards, leaning on the blindfolded per son. Doesn’t sound bad? We had to do this between two strings about a foot apart, without touching either string. Each pair on our team finally made it, and we went back to camp for hot chocolate and hot showers.

Through this God taught me the importance of unity for a team, no matter whether the team is doing a stress challenge or serving God. John 17:23 says, “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” So no matter what we are doing we should strive to do it with unity.

During the conference we each participated in one of several work projects. There was also free time to play games, sleep, or just talk.

Winter Conference 2000 was a great time for me spiritually and socially. I made some new friends and deepened relationships with others. I am looking forward to Winter Conference 2001.