Forward 2024

So here we are at Forward again, and things started this afternoon with Maddie and her friend from taekwondo, Kaylee.  You can see Michiah here as well, dressed in the bright pink t-shirt that all our volunteers are wearing.  This is Forward Mountain, which has been with us for quite some time lately.  It gets a fresh paint job each year, along with a new label.  This year's label celebrates the twenty years Forward has been in existence.  I remember the first ones at the main campus at Free Chapel, something we put together after doing so many visits to Winterfest.  We just figured we could do something like this on our own, and here we are getting the Gwinnett Arena and pretty much filling it up.  I remember those early days - I remember us stopping to pray for New Orleans one Forward Conference, as that night Hurricane Katrina was coming inland.

Anyway, back to the present.  Twenty years later, here's Maddie and Kaylee at the Chick-Fil-A that's next door to the arena.  We saw Brock there, and he actually dragged me back to the kitchen to introduce me to everyone else there.  I felt like I was in the inner sanctum!  

Of course, while there we saw all kinds of other Forward people, dressed in the various tribe colors.  After eating, we went over to the arena, and got ready for the conference.

Okay,  while waiting outside we spotted this advertisement, and this chiropractor's smile was pretty intense... so we had fun dong our own versions of it...!

Oh, and here's something else - Maddie and Kayle high-fiving one another before going down the big plunge.  The crowds had yet to really jump in, so this was good to hop on before things started.

We waited on line with a lot of other good friends, but it was pretty hot to begin with.  Fortunately, there came the overcast skies afterwards... and then there was a good steady rain too!  I got my umbrella, but we were pretty wet by the time we got in there.

But we did get in, and Maddie had a wonderful night.  

Huge night.  Lots of students, and it was super incredible.  Maddie and Kaylee loved it.  They were talking all the way home and even if it was late, they were still wired and talking about all the events of day one.  

It was a great start.  We got to sleep after prayers.  It was late.  And it was busy today - less than an hour south of us, both the President and the former President were engaged in a Presidential debate, and there seems to have been a clear winner.  The decisiveness of the victory is such that there is panic on one side, and things are shaping up to be yet another precedent-setting election year.  We'll see what happens as it unfolds, but it's all crazy, and it was all happening just down the road from us here.

We said our prayers tonight, and soon enough, we were all fast asleep, ready to start again with day two tomorrow.