Hey, Matt's daughter here. I just wanted to jump in really quick and say thank you to everyone

who supports the program. It means a lot.

Did you ever go to camps or music festivals or anything like that when you were a kid?

Or maybe an adulthood, maybe when it's a sponsor, maybe he's like going to music festivals as an adult.

If you did, here's one of the all-time truisms about such events. You can't explain the magic of it when you come home. Every time I go to camp as a kid, the story was the exact same. I really didn't want to go very bad. I didn't want to be here. It felt weird when I showed up. I didn't know anybody. I didn't like the people in my room. I didn't think I was going to fit in and started to get a little more fun. I got a crush on a girl or something. She ended up not liking me, but it was fun anyway. And I got some friends. And then we got to the last day and we all cried because we were all going to miss each other. I can't wait to come back next year. I get home from camp, I'd try to explain. But whenever we got done with that conversation, it just felt kind of hollow. You just had to kind of be there. And it doesn't feel

as rad when I explain it after the fact. Same thing with music festivals. We used to go to one

in particular called Cornerstone. I think it's defunct now. But it was a big woodstock kind of

sloppy, muddy mess, but at least ostensibly Christian.

They did it in Illinois.

It was fun every year.

I mean, I didn't feel like I totally fit in there either, but when I come back, I try to explain to people why it was cool.

It was very hard for me to explain the energy and the fun and the people I met and all the great things that came out of it.

Likewise. In this scene in the middle of John chapter one, where John is out baptizing people,

you're out here out here out here out here in the middle of nowhere. I guess people were just camping

it as kind of probably a festival vibe out here. In the middle of all of that, something truly

amazing and historic happens. And it seems to me,

as I read this passage and I'm about to read to you, that John the evangelist, the author of this

book, knew it was futile to try to set the scene and make you feel like you were there when the Baptist

was out baptizing at Bethany Beyond the Jordan.

He could try to explain it to us, but it just doesn't work when you try to explain music festivals

and camp and things like this where you just kind of had to be there.

So John the Evangelist kind of hustles by this scene out here at Bethany Beyond the Jordan. But he gives us enough

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