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URBANA Unites 17,000 Students Seeking Messiah's Missional Mandate! 

  Maggie To
  Pittsburgh Standard

From Dec 27 - Jan 01, I attended a missions conference in St. Louis, MO called Urbana. In all honesty, I didn’t set high expectations for this conference. What I did expect was a great time with my fellow Pitt Asian InterVarsity members and an epic welcoming into the New Year with 17,000 other college students.

I was doubtful of my potential for personal and spiritual growth. Over the past couple of years, I have had trouble experiencing intimacy with God and have wrestled with questions of faith. In spite of the conferences and revival meetings that I have attended, I often left feeling disappointment that I hadn’t met God in the ways that I had hoped to. On many occasions, this deepened my sense of doubt and detachment from God.

On my first night of Urbana, Greg Jao, the Urbana emcee, encouraged us to drop all our expectations or lack of expectation for this conference. “Let God do His work,” he said simply. That night I surrendered to God’s sovereignty and asked that He would work in me according to his will.

Much to my surprise, God began stirring up something in my heart. Each morning, we had Bible Study from the Gospel of John and I ate up every minute of it. I found myself hungering for more, a desire I hadn’t experienced in a long time. If you asked, I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint any significant worship experience or specific sermon that led to my change of heart. I think God was working in me gradually, reminding me of His greatness over the course of our six day mission conference.

Through the testimony of each of the speakers, God reminded me of His power. Every speaker had powerful stories to share of God’s deliverance in their lives. Each of them had surrendered their own ambitions and left their homes to dedicate their lives to missions.

As a pre-med student with aspirations of financial stability, I questioned whether it was a worthy lifestyle. Initially, I wrestled with the thought that these individuals were wasting their lives away. As the conference continued, however, I began to see that in spite of the cost, each missionary believed God was worth his or her sacrifice. They shared, often with tears, of how they had witnessed God’s power working in the mission field. I have thus begun to view God from a less narrow perspective. He’s not a small God confined to my own mere ambitions, but rather, He’s a powerful and mighty God – a God worth living and dying for.

As we worshiped as a body of 17,000 students, God reminded me of His BIGNESS and glory. We were a tribe of almost every tongue and nation gathered in that convention center for one purpose, to praise God. I was given a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven at Urbana. A thought passed through my head on the last night of the conference as we all sat in the convention center.

“Wow…we could fit the whole University of Pittsburgh in this dome...” It was a simple thought, but as I mused on it, it struck a chord in me. “What if we made an impact on campus such that we COULD fill this dome with believers?”

It seemed like a ridiculous thought at first, but I’ve been challenged to stop doubting God’s power and to PRAY BIG and pray with faith that this can happen.

My hunger for God’s purposes both in my life and on campus is greater than it has ever been before. I want to say that I found God at Urbana. Perhaps God has been waiting for me this whole time, but He grabbed hold of my heart at this conference. It’s not to say that I won’t continue to struggle. I haven’t yet wrestled through all my doubts, but I’m hungry to find answers and I have faith that whether or not God chooses to answer them, He remains a good God.

I remember the words spoken in Proverbs 3:5-6, “ Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”

Maggie To is a member of Pitt-Asian InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (AIV) at the University of Pittsburgh and attended IVCF's triennial missions conference called URBANA!

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