To NOLA and back: Reflections on the National Youth Gathering

I've been trying to put my thoughts together about our trip to the National Youth Gathering these past couple days...but for some reason, my mind just keeps going back to the statistics
- walls for 3 homes built
- over $400,000 donated to build wells around the world (that's 160 wells!)
- 1193 pints of blood and 509 heads of hair donated
- 400 service projects completed

When 33,309 youth get together to be little Christs for the world, a LOT can happen. 

The 2009 National Youth Gathering had a positive economic impact of over $42 million on the city of New Orleans.  I'm guess this gathering will have a similar impact. 

Beyond all the stats we do know is one we will never know...and that it how many lives were changed during the ELCA National Youth Gathering.  Sure there are the lives of the participants and the adult leaders who were behind all these statistics...but what about the lives of the people we met in the streets of New Orleans, the lives of the children we played with and read to, the lives of the people whose schools now have a brand new coat of paint on the walls, the lives of the families who homes we built, the lives of those who will receive the blood that was donated or the wigs created out of the hair donated. 

There was a lot of love in New Orleans last week as thousands upon thousands of ELCA Lutherans descended upon that great city and got to work breaking down walls and making a difference in the lives of people we met and in the lives of people we will never meet.  We were truly God's hands and feet in the City of New Orleans. 

But the most poignant moment of the gathering, for me, was the moment that those 33,309 youth plus adult leaders and volunteers stopped for a moment to pray for the victims of the shooting in Aurora, Colorado and for the shooter.  In that moment, that out pouring of love and the echos of the Amen that rang throughout the Superdome (...sorry, the Lutherdome) was so powerful that it could have only come from God. 

I boarded the bus for the trip home on Sunday afternoon very proud to be a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  It was a blessing to see so much love poured out on the city of New Orleans, so much hospitality showered upon us, and to see how visible God was in changing the youth that attended, filling them with the Holy Spirit who gathered us together for this event and then scattered us to our hometowns to begin the work the needs to be done there...to be done here. 

I am very much looking forward to the next gathering in Detroit in 2015.  It is a city of resilient people who are fighting to keep their hometown alive and vibrant.  There have been great strides in this with the increase in community gardens that were once vacant homes, in young adults moving into the city to revitalize it, and in people who believe in the spark that Detroit has always had within it.  There is a lot of need in Detroit, though, and I look forward to the impact that 35,000 teenagers can have on what I believe is the greatest city in the US.