The Video

For those of you that don't know it, a few months ago I made a video to enter into a competition sponsored by the Youth Mission Initiative called ymiLive. We were one of the 15 finalists out of about 120 videos. Three videos were picked as winners of a $25,000 endowment for their youth group.

Well, the video didn't win.

I thought that the voting ended on Thursday but when I brought my friends to the voting booth today, I was a little miffed to find out that the voting was closed on Tuesday. I always mix up those "t" days. I didn't even get to wear my WOOt shirt cause I was saving it for voting day.

I was really sad that it lost.

I personally worked very hard on it. My church worked hard to get it to be a finalist--little old ladies spent hours at their computers trying to register to vote for it. The whole church was engaged. Some people even thought I was going to California just for the video.

So today they announced the videos and we didn't win.

And I don't want to go home and tell my church.

Of course, I have an excuse I'd like to offer. The YADs picked the three winners, and to vote, you had to go to the exhibit hall, find the booth, watch all fifteen videos (that are four minutes long, which equals more than an hour and the average amount of time that we have in the exhibit hall is, oh, about 15 minutes.) To me, that equals a few kids wandering over to the booth, looking at a few of the videos at the top (ours was near the bottom), and then having to leave so they either vote on the three they've watched so far, or forget about it for the rest of the week. Plus, as Luke demonstrates below, some of the videos were just a little strange.


I really did think our video was a ministry. We made sixteen videos when we went to New Orleans in January and our ymiLive entry was a sampling of them. Our goal to tell the story of New Orleans was manifest in the videos. The money would help to make the videos into DVDs to distribute to others.

I called my mom and cried when I had to tell her we lost. I feel like I let down so many people. I suppose there wasn't much I could do than tell people about it. It's not their or my fault that it was too hard to vote, but I did not see this coming. I never pictured having to make an excuse.

So we lost. That's ok, I guess. The important thing is that people see the video and the message of the people of New Orleans gets out.

So, watch. Please. :)