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First, HBF would like to thank all of you who prayed for God’s blessing on our conference. God surely heard your prayers as our conference was full of the work of God throughout each and every day.

After a lot of brainstorm and ideas, we finally came up with the title of our conference. Ironically, it was the simplest title we came up with. It was HBForgiven. Throughout Galatians Bible Study every week, it became clear that our younger teenagers, many of whom were sheltered in their UBF homes their whole lives, did not really know and understand that they were sinners. Therefore, when they heard words of the wonderful grace and love of God, it was like planting
seeds on hard paths. So contrary to last year which focused on the resurrection, this year the HBF leaders decided to focus on the cross.

Our Program Committee chose Romans 5 and 6 and Luke 23 and 24 to meditate on during the conference.

HBF does Easter conferences a little differently from every other conference. Each year, the seniors are all designated as messengers or life testimony sharers, the juniors are Group Bible Study leaders, and everybody except the seniors join a committee. The program committee
decides on the programs and passages for the whole conference. The art committee takes care of the banner, power point, and arts and crafts, the admin committee raises money and takes care of the administrative details for the conference.

A week before the conference began we held prayer meetings every night at 6:30, where we had a few testimony sharers, prayed, and all of the committees met afterwards to prepare. The seniors spent 12 hours last Monday meditating and struggling to write their messages together.
Every day, they struggled with the word of God and fought hard until God finally broke their hearts with the love story of Easter.

The first night, we had an opening message from Grace Wolff on Romans 5:1-11. She delivered a sincere and spirited message. Her message was soon followed by a repentant and glorious message from Mary Lee on the second half of Romans 5, “Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ!”. God really worked through them to make a good environment for the entire conference from the very beginning. Their struggle to really accept the Word of God before delivering made our little meeting room truly a Holy ground where God could dwell among us.

On Saturday morning, David Cho delivered on the first half of Romans 6. He studied the passage with diligence, and God spoke to him and through him about the love that Christ had for us. He spoke about the agony of separation with God that Jesus had to go through, and the
weight and guilt of all the sin that he bore. But Jesus did not do this with a grumbling heart, but out of pure love for us. Because Jesus did this, we are set free from being slaves to our sins, and become slaves of righteousness. Amen. His conclusion after struggling with his own slavery to his sins was, that we must first die to sin,

second, count ourselves as a free children of God, and offer yourselves to Him.

After David, Mary Pierce delivered a message on Romans 6:15-23. We were really blessed by her message. After much preparation leading up to the conference, she was finally asked if she believed anything she was saying. She broke into tears and rewrote her whole message that
night. She shared about the greatest gift that we could have, and it is free and here waiting for us to accept. Her key verse was 23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

After the meeting, we had Bible trivia games, and a tug of war tournament, and the HBF leaders were the strongest team. It was a joyful time, and the sun was shining and you can see God’s spirit in each of the kids and leaders even during our break time.

Later, during our main evening meeting, we had two messages on the cross, one given by Michelle Melzer and the second by Nicky Timlin. Nicky went through so many revisions of his message because he refused to open his heart. At first, he said, “I don’t want to write any
personal application, because I want the focus to be on the Word of God and not me.” But God stirred his heart during the conference, and during message training, he broke down in tears as the message of the cross pierced his heart. He closed his message by asking everybody to
please spend the night preciously, because we can meet our savior tonight. So we finished the night in prayer. We brought a hammer and nails, and a wooden cross and spent time praying and wrote down our repentant prayers and nailed our sins to the cross. I was moved by the
sincerity of even the goofy kids like Paul Albright and others.

Finally, on Sunday morning, we heard two more messages. The gospel isn’t done yet! We have to hear of the glorious resurrection! So Hannah Lee and Peter Albright shared on Luke 24. They really showed us the glory of the resurrection through their messages. We were especially encouraged to see Peter, who is usually very emotionless and expressionless to be so animated. He acted out how scared the disciples were when they saw the risen Jesus. But we were really surprised at how he changed. His attitude in the beginning was very reluctant to prepare a message. He shared that even though he heard so many resurrection messages, it did not really mean anything to him. It did not seem like he was going to struggle to accept his message even though the leaders asked him to over and over again. But he spent time by himself preparing his message and God blessed his faith. He delivered a wonderful message with a resurrected spirit!

Besides our messages, we also had thought provoking and meaningful group Bible studies led by the juniors. And we also go to hear three life testimonies from Michael Young, Bahgi, and Hannah Rarick. I was reminded that there are so many broken young people in our world, and
even among our children. Children are very sensitive to relationships and especially relationships to their families. With broken relationships, there are always broken hearts and much suffering. But thanks be to God who is our heavenly father and full of love. God healed the wounds of Michael, Bahgi, and Hannah, and gave them life! When you see them you can see they have the joy and peace and love of God in their hearts. Praise God who worked mightily in the hearts of
our young generation. Let’s pray that they can continue to grow and that the seniors can go to their respective colleges with a clear identity and life as God’s children.

Reported by Sam