World Youth Day in Panama.

The band was invited to play at World Youth Day in Panama this past January. It was such a great honor to be invited, but also a bit overwhelming. When we travel places, we are usually greeted our new church family who takes us under their wing and gives us pretty much royal treatment. World Youth Day hosts over 100 performers and the Pope himself visits. The red carpet was rolled out for the Pope and we were on our own as performers. In an event of this scope, planning is important, but flexibility is KEY. No one was quite sure how communication, transportation, and ministry would work in an event of this scope. Let me just say I did not learn, “I need phantom power on microphone one,” in any of my 3 years of high school Spanish. Location and schedule changes were made on the day of events as needed. 

WYD is a pilgrimage. We were prepared to make a sacrifices and look for the graces. We knew the transportation, meals, and language would require sacrifice. We were not sure where the graces would be (maybe in meeting the Pope). The Pope waved at our family - which was cool, but we really saw God in the simple things. We witnessed regular people going out of their way so that others can meet Jesus. Our prayers were answered by ordinary people being Jesus to others.

As far as our performances, we were most excited about our stage show and figured the adoration chapel time would be a nice time for prayer for us, but probably would not have many people there. We were wrong! Quite the opposite! Our stage show was a struggle for many reasons, but when we got to the adoration chapel it was swarming with people entering in for a moment of prayer. We were just feet from Jesus in the Eucharist, a first class relic of St. Teresa of Calcutta, and the Pilgrim Statue of Our Lady of Fatima. It was outside, packed with people, and hot, but full of grace!

Once our performances were over, we able to simply be pilgrims. We journeyed to the Evening vigil to spend the night on the field with almost a million others. It was evident that the organizing committee spent most of it efforts in making this event go smoothly. It was amazing to see so many people joined together in love and peace. 

Trinity has put together a series of videos from our trip to World Youth Day. There are six short videos. Enjoy!