"I don't know the words to their songs," I said to my sister over the phone. It wasn't a question of not going. As soon as we'd expressed the thought, we knew we were going. I just wasn't exactly sure what would happen once we got there.

"I don't think it matters," she said. "You can just hum along. That's what I'm going to do."

It had been just over a year since my family had put all of our belongings into an enormous truck and made our way out of California, to a place I'd never even visited before: Lexington, Kentucky. My sister and her family had come a year previously, not long after they'd watched the city nearest to them be burned and looted by rioting mobs.

We came because those places had become unlivable for us.

But even though we've left them behind us, we still worry. We both know that the forces that turned our former homes into what they are now are not isolated to those geographies, and indeed appear to be moving across the entire earth with seemingly unstoppable power and speed. We worry about economic collapse, medical tyranny, CBDCs and social-credit systems powering up to control every aspect of our lives, the threat of nuclear war, chemical spills, crime, the list seems endless. Mostly, we worry about our kids, and about the kind of world they are growing up into.

So when we found ourselves living about a half hour north of what had spontaneously become the "Asbury Revival", the choice seemed clear.

It was icy when we got there. Tiny occasional snowflakes floated in the air around us, and a line of people stretched all the way from the entrance to Hughes Auditorium down to the sidewalk by Lexington Avenue, and up along West College Street.

We struck up a conversation with a man who was heading in the same direction.

"So what do you think is happening here?" He asked.

A "revival"? An "outpouring"? The words didn't seem to matter, didn't capture what we thought was happening, or why we had come.

"I think there's a real hunger for something," said my sister, "for connection, for an experience of the divine, of something bigger."

All around us, there was an air of quiet anticipation. Nobody seemed annoyed or dispirited when a man wearing a little tag that read "usher" stepped up to our part of the line and told us that it would be at least a few hours before we could expect to get into Hughes.

The man lived nearby, and had been called in to help. "This is all new to us," he told us, his own face wide with wonder, "none of this was planned." He told us that there were  "overflow chapels" where there might still be seats, across the street, and we thanked him and made our way down.

Inside it was warm. The service in the much larger Hughes Auditorium – which had been going continuously for nine days now –  was being simulcast on two screens at the front of the chapel. Music filled the air, and all around us people stood, sat, swayed, prayed, held their arms up in the air, or didn't. We found seats and joined them.