One week ago today was the start of Seize The Summer Tour 2013. It feels like a month has gone by since then.

We started the tour at Jitter’s Coffee House in Millersburg, OH. We love that place, but I don’t remember ever seeing it quite as crazy as it was last Monday night when STS2013 came rolling in.

It was awesome! The weather was ominous, so we moved inside and packed the place (a good move, I would say).

Part of STS2013 is a segment where we invite people to create a cardboard testimony and share it with the audience. It is a little intimidating, and a lot invigorating. When people boldly come forward to proclaim how God has saved them in one way or another, it is a really moving time of worship and praise. Monday night at Jitter’s was awesome.

From there we travelled to Accident, MD and spent time with the Cherry Glade Mennonite youth group. It was great to reconnect with their group and worship our saving God together.

We headed out at 4:30am the following morning so that we could get to a school in Eastern Pennsylvania. We put on STS2013 in the school gymnasium and it was pretty crazy. They were a great group… Of course, they had to be because they were stuck with us (haha). We were not sure how it was going to go at first, but by the time the cardboard testimonies came along we were overwhelmed by the power of God. It was a steady stream of cardboard testimonies. We were afraid that we would run out of cardboard!

The next day we were in another high school. Unfortunately, we had to try to cram our 90 minute program into a 39 minute time slot. It was still a great event, but we wished we would have had more time.

Immediately after tearing down our equipment, we were on the road again heading for Central Pennsylvania (near the home of the Little League World Series). We briefly stepped outside of the Seize The Summer program to lead worship for a “Youth Day” event with New Tribes Missions. 300 kids spent their entire Saturday with us at this event. They were learning about world missions and God’s heart for the lost. We were blessed to be a part of it!

We packed up our gear and headed home after Youth Day. We nearly hit a deer on the way home (that woke everyone up), spent Sunday morning in our home churches, and then met up again at New Grounds Café for “Sunday Night Live”. We had so much fun breaking down to acoustic music and solid preaching…

Now we are back at it. Tonight we will be at Walnut Creek Cheese in Walnut Creek, OH. The weather looks beautiful so we plan to be outside in the parking lot. Afterwards we will be having an after party at New Grounds Café. Then on Wednesday morning we head out on the “West” leg of our tour. Our first stop is in Michigan near Grand Rapids. We are excited to see how God will be moving this week.

Perhaps I should keep a daily journal from here on out. That would probably be better than trying to recap at the end of the week…