On July 7, 2006, the Billy Graham Evangelical Association held the Franklin Graham Festival in Baltimore, Maryland. This event ran through July 9, 2006 at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. A contact in my Sunday School class got the whole class involved in the work involved in running this festival and I was a part of this event. This may well be the largest event that I am ever a part of.
From what we have been told, the budget for the event was around two million dollars. Planning took 3 years, setting everything up took 9 months and followup will take another two months. The goal was three thousand counselors of which I was one. Almost 700 churches took part in this festival. Over 150 churches directly took part in the festival which featured free concerts on each of the three nights of the festival plus a children’s event on Saturday morning.
My point is that this was a very large event. If, however, you are not impressed, then you are closer to what I am trying to express. I worked deep enough in the event to have a security pass that would get me everywhere but onto the stage. It was an odd feeling to be taken that seriously. There is nothing important about me.
Now that the festival is over, I am going to miss it. I am sorry that I did not get to be part of the team driving one of the bands from the airport to the hotel and then to the stadium. It is just possible that I will miss getting up early and going to the stadium to volunteer to do something. The whole time that I was at the festival, I wanted to work. That is my nature and I only regret that I did not do enough.
However, the whole event did not feel real to me. All of my badges and passes were real. The people I helped out on odd tasks were all real people. Even the person that I witnessed to as a counselor, Michael, was very real. Can I be the only person who has felt this way?
Next month, I will be 38. When I was doing real work with the adults in the festival, it felt like the same way as when I was volunteering as part of a group of children. Maybe it is that I was actually enjoying being on the Lord’s time. I do not know this feeling, so it could be the truth and I would not know it. This environment, out in the bright sun all day long, is so alien to me that it should have made me very sick and it did not hurt me.
The event took me more seriously than I take myself. My memory is failing and it makes me feel like a fraud. That is the only feeling that I really know because it is a feeling that I can never escape. Could this be the reason why the event felt more like a game than a real job that I volunteered for?
Do not get me wrong. This is something that, granted the ability, I would do again. I enjoy labor more than my body can now withstand it. Sitting still is like dental surgery to me. Maybe, for me, this work was what other people call fun.
I am babbling here only to ponder why the all this work on such a large project feels like a game to me. It really did not feel real to me. The whole three days, days with little sleep, were like a dream in my mind. Every word of my question is literally the truth of what I am asking myself at this point. Am I the only person of my generation on the planet Earth that has felt this numbness? Was this all, as it feels to me, only a dream?

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