Monday began with traveling. I won’t bore you with the details, but there was one stop worth mentioning. Here are some photos of the best gas station I’ve ever been to. Here you can get some taxidermied animals, some gas (full-service by the way), and your families tombstone.
Who loves bears? This guy!
Do you need to memorilize your dead, or are you just here for gas?
Now it’s time to move on to the real point of the trip MOVE conference.
This week we are moving through the Exodus, and seeing how their story is our story. On our first night we talked about identity. We looked at Moses, a man who was clearly conflicted. Born to Israelite parents, but raised by Egyptian royalty, eventually self-exiled for murder, and finally toiling away in seeming anonymity as a nomadic shepherd. But then God called. In their conversation Moses asked the question that seems so pertinent to us, “Who Am I?” God’s answer to such a profoundly self-aware realization of Moses inability to define himself, is “I will be with you.” As Moses tries to turn his encounter with God into an opportunity learn about himself, God invites Moses to come and learn about who he is. Moses is empowered because he is with God, and Moses–who has chalked his life up to something of a lost cause–discovers that the God of the universe considers him worthwhile enough to invite him to be a part of what he is doing in the world. The man who never truly fit in with his Hebrew people, now will be leader, and walk alongside the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses has founf an identity.
I can’t think of any topic more appropriate for modern day high school students. I remember what it was like to walk in their shoes. To desperatley seek the approval of others. To hope that people identify you as that kid who is funny, or cool, or hot, or popular, or smart, or whatever. Those markers that cry out an assertion, “I matter! I’m special!” only to follow it with that insecure moment of never really knowing if it’s true. For many highschool is about identity, trying out different identites until we find one that fits, one that helps find a group of people that accept us, even if we lose ourselves in the process. The story of Moses and God, our story with God, is really about finding out that our identity is wrapped up with Him. Ultimately we are who we are because God walks with us, just where we are, just as we are. God looks at us exactly as we really are, at the deepest and darkest place, and invites us to walk with him. Suddenly all of the rest our identity markers don’t really matter. No more masks, no moe games, no more prenteding to be someone we’re not hoping that others will approve. Listen to what one of our students, Luke, said about today: “It helped me realize the worthlessness of earthly identities, and encouraged me to remember the One in whose image I was created.”
What will we remeber from today: Identity= We walk with God.
More pictures from today can be found at our facebook page.
