Urbana 2012

I spent the December 27-January 1 in St. Louis for Urbana 2012. I'm still processing my experience, but overall I really enjoyed it. Urbana is a missions conference that Intervarsity hosts every 3 years. I also went in 2009 so I sort of knew what to expect.

The theme for the week was the great invitation. We studied the chapter of Luke. The beginning of the week challenged us to accept God's invitation to us. We need to accept Him and look at ourselves and what is holding us back from accepting all of Him before we can share this invitation to others. As the week went on we learned more about how to extend that invitation to others and how we needed to go and share the good news with others.

It's amazing to be with 16,000 people worshipping God in multiple languages, listening to speakers from different countries. They also have a variety of seminars that you can go to about a lot of different topics. The ones I went to were based on healthcare. I wasn't as impressed this year with the seminars as I was in 09.

One of the things that we did this year was called a join-in. We partnered with community workers in Swaziland and packed medical bags for them to use as they work with HIV/AIDS patients. The had videos telling the stories of how these medical bags came to be and we were also able to hear from one of the community workers. It was amazing to hear her story in person as well as some of the other people affiliated with World Vision and the medical packs. It was amazing to be able to partner with these community workers and package 32,000 medical kits to send to Africa so these community healthcare workers can continue to do the amazing job that they are doing.

The speakers at Urbana were also great. You can watch any of the talks online here.  Here are some of the quotes that I wrote down from the speakers that really spoke to me.

• Jesus is worthy of all our trust, all our plans and dreams, and all of our affections -David Platt
• What happens when the church believes that Jesus is really enough? -David Platt
• When was the last time you wasted time with God? -Calisto Odede
• When we act like God is dead, it is not Him who dies, but us -Ram Sridharan
• We are a lost humanity that needs to be found -Ram Sridharan
• Don't climb a tree from the top-you start where you are -Calisto Odede

The end of the week we each got a decision card to commit to what we are playing to do when we got home. I committed to a mid-year and long-term mission. I'm not quite sure what that will look like at this point in my life. I want to somehow use my pharmacy degree to do missions. This may be in an urban area or may be in another country. I still haven't figured out exactly what that will look like, but I know that I just need to continue to say yes to God and he will show me exactly where he wants me to be. 

If you decide to watch any of the videos from above I would recommend watching David Platt and Ram Sridharan's. They were both really good talks and I will probably watching them again to see things that I didn't catch the first time.