Home

Well, we're home. I'm sad the conference is over, but now we both have the daunting task of decompressing after all this information.

Below are the pictures, but here are the highlights for me:

-- Getting to experience Mike Yaconelli via a video retrospective in the first session. David and I are so new to YS that we really never knew anything about him. Wow. What a powerful message. His wife, Carla, still runs YS and hosted the sessions, and she was great. I love her. Got to talk to her at the end of the conference... she was so gracious. We gave her a LJG CD.

-- Rob Bell, who spoke about owning truth wherever we find it, instead of constantly classifying things "Christian" and "secular." He made the point that if "the earth is the Lord's and EVERYTHING in it," we shouldn't be surprised if we hear a secular humanist speaking what sounds like God's truth. They live in God's world. Sometimes people who don't know God can stumble onto His truth, too, so we need to stop being so dang exclusive and close-minded. It was so good. So good.

-- Chap Clark's session on "Six Longings of Today's Kids," Oh my gosh. What an amazing, eye-opening class that was. I understand why youth culture is so different now than it was when I was a kid, and I see my students in a totally different light now. I am so glad that this was my first seminar, and it served as sort of an intro into everything else I heard this week.

-- David Crowder's worship leading for the majority of the week. It was great to see him for an extended period of time. Although I must admit that 3500 people jumping up and down during "Sing Like the Saved" was a little scary... the floor was literally bending so much under the strain that even the chandeliers were swaying! It was awesome. I figured corporate worship is probably the best of all ways to die, so it was all good.

-- Jeff Johnson, Brian Dunning, and John Fitzpatrick. Wow. Beautiful, almost liturgical celtic worship music. Brian and John flew in from Ireland... a piper and a fiddle player. It was gorgeous. I wept.

-- Stephen Iverson, who led us in a Taize-style prayer service. I am intrigued by Taize style prayer. Want to learn more about it. It is very contemplative and involves singing the prayers/scriptures in a short, meditative way (each "song" is 4 lines, max) and then silence. Again, I wept. I used to be really into the quiet, contemplative, meditative prayer, and my life has been such that I have totally forgotten about what that was like. Iverson and Johnson both served as agents to remind me that that has been missing and needs to be restored in my spiritual life. It has been water to my soul this week to just be still before God.

-- Jars of Clay! Omigosh. What a show they put on. I love them for their musicianship as well as for their incredibly deep, un-CCM lyrics.

-- the verse that was the theme of the week, which is expressed so beautifully in The Message version of the Bible: "Dear, dear Corinthians, I can't tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn't fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren't small but you're living them in a small way. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!"

I am refreshed, renewed, and have a whole heck of a lot to process from all the classes we went to. It's good to be home.