How I wish I could be back at home right now.  This is why.

The Passion World Tour is making a stop in Jakarta on August 5. They’ve already visited Manila and Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta will cap its Southeast Asia tour. They have even gone to the extent of making a version of the event information page in Indonesian.

Passion is a movement made up of young people who have abandoned the idea of living simply for themselves and are daily giving everything so the world can see Jesus more clearly. Passion is about the glory of God, inspiring a wave of students to taste and see that He is good and to do something now to change the world in Jesus’ name.

The Facebook event for the tour already has over 800 attendees for the Jakarta venue. Given that most Indonesian students don’t own a Facebook account, there are likely many more who will attend the event. But why would Passion choose a place like Jakarta? The website expressed its reasons for choosing the cities they did.

We’ve discovered that every major city in the world is a university town, most home to hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions of students. So, Passion is off on a crazy journey to the cities of the world in 2008, uniting university students around the globe in a story so much bigger than our own.

As the booming capital city, Jakarta is a center of higher education in Indonesia. Many of my childhood friends now go to private and public universities in and around Jakarta. These centers of learning are also slowly catching up to the pace of higher education in many other countries. Universities have always been in the leading role of reform in Indonesian history. In 1928, youth nationalists drafted the Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda) to promote a unified country, 17 years before independence was achieved. Seventy years later, student uprisings also started the events which led to the resignation of Suharto (pdf), who had been president for over 30 years. Since then, the student community has received a lot of attention as education continues to improve.

Since I won’t be able to make it to the event, I look forward to reading about it, just like I’ve been reading about the Manila and Kuala Lumpur events.