Here's to you Mission Christ.

Driving home tonight, I got thinking about having to grow up and how I'm so thankful for how it happened because of an awesome group I like to call Family (aka Mission Christ).

By going to Mission Christ, I put myself in a position where I was one of the youngest attending, a girl, and not going at all for the right reasons. I went for my friend and then a boy. Not until maybe 3 or so months in, did I start going for Jesus . . . and the boy.

Because of Mission Christ, I learned my building blocks of following Jesus from whether or not I could hear ghosts (thanks Beth) to visibly seeing more than enough people under spiritual warfare and being thrown into the situation to help "diffuse" it. (thanks everyone). The most important thing that I learned in my first of going to Mission, was the importance of worship and how worship frees a persons spirit from the flesh. With that, worship is still something that I rely heavily on for getting comfy with talking to God before all the deep stuff starts.

But, there is so much more to Mission Christ than the Jesus aspect; we've played games, stayed up late talking and giving massages on retreats, putting holes in walls that didn't necessarily need holes, milk gallon challenges (GO CAHILL) and so many other things that happened before my time as an Mission Christ-er. And that is what made Mission so wonderful for me, I didn't feel thrown into the whole church thing but I felt accepted for my lack of knowledge and urgency to learn.

Now, 4 years later, a lot of things have changed: I'm too old for Mission. I actually have to search out something new. I have to search for a new Mission. And that has been challenging because I compare opportunities to Mission. Is this good? I don't know. I know what I like and I know that my "likes" and "dislikes" come from my experiences with Mission but, learning to move on and seek out something different is a struggle. What about my Mission friends? Ya, they're still there. With my 'generation' of Mission, we're all in college now and working and doing other things but ya, we see each other ever so often.

But, when God closes a door, it's best to accept it. And we all have for the most part. Sometimes, when a select few of my generation Mission friends get together, we travel down memory lane but that does nothing but makes us yearn for the past, a past we will honestly never get back.

So, here's to you Mission Christ. Thank you for making and molding me into the woman I am tonight, sitting here at my computer at almost 11pm as a Freshman in college. Thank you for the memories and thank you for making my standards for a youth group so high. Thank you for not being a cliche youth group, but rather, a family to me and so many others.

I should stop writing before I break down in tears.
But I will say this, if you are a high schooler that is reading this and this Mission thing sounds really interesting, let me know, I can hook you up.

Ahavah Nitzeach
-Angie 


(That's Hebrew for "Love Prevails")