Conferencing and New Things

Chris and are are back from a week and a half of traveling. For us, the trip began with a few days of vacation--first San Francisco, then Napa--that was just wonderful (and needed after Christmas!).

It was both of ours first visit to the West Coast, though rain in San Francisco meant we didn't get to see the Pacific till we'd been in CA for several days!

While in Napa, we trekked to Sonoma and worshipped at Sonoma UMC, where people were very nice and Chris even got asked to read the scripture for their (early, contemporary) service.

After all that, we headed for what was a real reason for being in CA: the National United Methodist Camp and Retreat Leaders Conference. The conference was held at Mt. Hermon Center near Santa Cruz, and it was great to see old friends and make new ones.

We ran into Dan Randall, one of my seminary classmates, who with his wife is director of Camp Wesley in Latvia. We got to spend time with Chris' former camp colleagues from the Minnesota Annual Conference, and spend time with colleagues from our own conference. Sadly, Meg, our cook at Manidokan, had to fly back home the first day of the conference because her boyfriend Jody was badly injured in a car accident--the good news is he had successful surgery to repair his stomach wall, and is now home resting and recovering from that and some broken ribs and a sprained ankle.

The conference was a chance for me to get some CEU (Continuing Education Units)...since I'm now ordained, I have to get a certain number of these each quadrennium, and I got a whole 2 at the conference! Yay! The workshops were great, and the only one Chris and I went to together was one led by Bob Ditter, a child psychologist, who we've heard on video before, but was just incredibly dynamic in person.

There was a lot more at the conference worth note, but for now, I'll move on to the final stop of our voyage: ROCK.

ROCK is our conference's annual youth retreat in Ocean City, Maryland. This year we had the task of promoting this summer's (and first annual) ENCOUNTER event at Manidokan. It's an outdoor youth festival/retreat. We led two workshops along with Stephen Gallaher of Salt'n Light Youth Ministries. Encounter is July 15-18 this year, and the buzz was pretty cool. Check out www.bwcumc.org/encounter for more info (registration should go live later this week).

Now I'm back "in the office" trying to get things done...things seem to have been somewhat calm at church while I was away, but with meetings this week and Lent starting in a few, it's been a busy day already!

I'll plan to post in more detail about some of my experiences, but for now, it's off to get my feet back under me after being away for so long...