New Attitude 2006

Ahh, New Attitude :-) It's interesting - my past Na's have been very good times, but I was a fairly lowly tagalong, in the shadow of social greats like Matt Duncan and Eric Grover, feeling mildly left out but still having a great time (I've gotten very good at that over the years). This Na I was smack in the middle of a drastically different set of people. I didn't hang too much with the older singles crowd from Providence (Domenica, Lisa, Joel and Cindy, etc.), but instead I ended up in a core group of me, Daniel, Heather Q and Jess Mittelman, and mixed that up plentifully with the emerging singles scene from Pittsburgh and Akron. I was older than pretty much everybody I hung out with, and the entire conference was suffused with the invigorating enjoyment of hanging out with young people. We wrung those four days of every moment of craziness and experience that we could, for once (for me at least) stringing ourselves out heedlessly on caffeine and disregarding the human body's need for sleep. And I regret nothing but the last two hours of the all-nighter Monday night (Tuesday morning, actually) when everybody went to bed and I felt weird and had nothing to do and it was getting light. When I think of New Attitude I think of Jess Mittelman, Daniel, Heather and Justin, the food court, the circle screens, the weird snappy snare drum sound, the street between the Galt House and the Hyatt, Mike Bullmore, imitation lucky charms, pop cans chilled on the AC vent, and the hazy glow of the streetlights Monday Night.

Spiritually, New Attitude was the gospel Red Bull I had hoped it would be. Josh Harris, Mark Dever and Mike Bullmore laid out the call to applying and understanding the gospel Saturday night and Sunday morn and aft, and Sunday night CJ paced the stage and poured out his heart, bringing us to our knees with his stirring presentation of the gospel itself. He seemed like the Apostle Paul, crying out to us from the storehouse of passion God has given him. Then on Monday we were informed on the Holy Spirit and deeply challenged to evangelism. Josh Harris capped it off Tuesday morning with a summary of what we'd heard and a perfect portrayal of how the devil will try to kill the seeds that had been sown and how we must, in that moment of failure and despair, hold fast to the gospel. Hold fast to the gospel. Hold fast to the GOSPEL.
On Monday afternoon I went to Mike Bullmore's breakout session about feeding on God through prayerful meditation on the Bible. IMO it should have been a keynote session :-) It left me with no excuse to not have regular morning devotions, great expectations for such devotions, and a simple, eminently doable plan for them. Thank you Mike! I'm looking to get up at 7:30am, devote for 30 minutes, and then rush to get ready and head to Pitt. Oh Lord, may I at last gain some measure of success and consistency in this area!
My family group was great. We were small, but they put together the community groups (150 or so people, of whom 15 family groups are formed for personal application and discussion after the sessions) by geographical area, so I knew or had some connection with almost everyone. Our leader was a champ, and our group was solid, and Jocelyn seemed a lot like me which was funny.

Some moments and experiences of interest:

- Catching up with the two PChOP vans on the way down, though we had left 2 hours after them!
- On the elevator ride up to my room immediately upon arrival having a totally random woman say "You're from Pittsburgh, right? [I'm freaking out inside] ..John....Behrens?" She turned out to be Sarah Kearney's Mom whom I'd never truly met before. So bizarre!
- Plunging my head into the swimming pool after wandering around the Beatles festival Saturday afternoon and getting very hot.
- Great conversation with Akron girls over dinner at the food court Saturday night.
- Playing guitar by the street outside the Galt House with Justin, Steve-O and Craig Saturday night, and then retiring to the empty lobby on the 25th floor for drowsy hanging-outage.
- Talking with Justin as our legs got rained on outside the Galt House waiting for the pizza to come for the PChOP pizza dinner Sunday afternoon.
- Going out with some of the older singles from Providence Sunday night and getting, appropriately, bourbon.
- Sitting at the bottom of the cavernous Hyatt between 2:30 and 4:30am Sunday night and writing a song, as I boldly claimed I would as we exited the Calano's room. It ain't a bad song, either. The only people around were hispanic hotel employees and the occasional small group returning from the bars.
- One such lady running over upon hearing the guitar and having me play a song. I pulled out "Blackbird" by the Beatles, and she was smitten. I got $6 for one song! :-) (We only made a total of $4 and some change Saturday night, all four of us!)
- Hanging in the Akron girls' hotel room with a ton of folks for lunch Monday since everything was closed 'cause it was Memorial Day. I had to work hard, but I did get some profitable conversation in :-)
- Swimming with Daniel, Jess, Luke and Matt H Monday afternoon.
- And that most magical of all times, those glorious timeless hours in the humid glow of the orange sodium-vapor lamps surrounding the square block of grass across from the convention center Monday night. I honestly don't even know what time we were there for. I just know that we sat and sang worship songs by the fountains for a long time and then played frisbee for hours in the lovely rectangle of grass. The temperature was perfect--I never once thought of us being outside. It was like that lit up block was our house. We ran barefoot onto the roads to get frisbees, we tore across the grass with our shirts off, we wandered around the fountains, and we sat at the tables and benches talking and playing guitar softly. We're outside? It's 3 in the morning? It's downtown Louisville Kentucky?

There is much more I could detail here, but I will leave it at this, hoping that these skeletal and emotional accounts will spur my memory in the future, and impart to my readers the feel of the conference. It's funny--I can get totally full of the people memories as though I spent the weekend hanging out, or I can get enveloped in the spiritual memories as though I was buffeted by a gale of quality teaching in isolation. But in God's great goodness those two were mutually inclusively present in one radiant weekend. And there I will leave you--gazing at this wonderful loving God who blessed me with such fun and such a merciful buffet of digestable truth, and most of all, who crushed His Son for me. He crushed him. Christ stood there mutilated, hated and beaten with the ferocity that MY perverse sins deserved, alone, with no answer from the Father who turned away from Him. I will never have to know the bottomless anguish Jesus experienced, and right now (and always) there is no obstacle to me freely coming to God, praying to Him, talking to Him, and being loved by Him. Thank you New Attitude, thank you Josh, thank you CJ, thank you GOD!

--Clarified Ambassador