SO MUCH CRAZINESS!

So here I am, sitting in the lobby of the Doubletree Hotel in Orange, unwinding for a few minutes. See, we just finished day 2 of Winter Conference planning, but let me tell you- it's been a lot more than that going on lately...

Two weeks ago, I had to say "see you in December" to all the guys I do discipleship with. Last week was what's called Cross '09. All campus staff in the US crossed cultures to do ministry. Here in LA, we focused on starting Destino movements (the branch of Cru focused on reaching Latino students). It was FANTASTIC! I was assigned to Los Angeles City College with Heather, Paul, and Trina from our campus team, Bob and Jill Fuhs who are on our regional team, 5 staff from Korean CCC, Peter the intern from Illinois, and Josh and Allie Johnson, also from Illinois. We spent those days going non-stop initiating conversations with Latino students, sharing the Gospel with them when needed, but also trying to find potential student leaders for a Destino group at LACC. We had so many awesome, eye-opening conversations with Latino students who really made us come face-to-face with the realities of their poverty, their lack of education, the frustration they feel with the lack of motivation their peers have, etc. So many of them got to hear the truth about Christ for the first time, and we definitely got in touch with some students who are interested in helping us out with starting Destino. Praise God!

But it was an absolutely draining week. Throw in an urban hike through downtown, Matt Swaney's final weekly meeting, and a day of staff/shepherd team meetings, and you get a draining week.

I got a little bit of time to recover over the weekend, and then yesterday morning at 10, it was time to check in to the Doubletree for the next 7 days! Yesterday and today, allllll day, I've been working in our team of 6 staff/interns to plan our Winter Conference! Again, it's SUCH a privilege and honor to get to work on this team to plan such a big conference that historically has been used by the Lord repeatedly to change lives. But it's been intense. Planning from 10-10 fries your brain good.

So that brings me to now. We finished all our planning for all the meetings- we just need to meet tomorrow morning for about an hour and a half to finalize a couple of details. But then half an hour later, check-in starts for our regional staff conference where staff from the entire region (Hawaii, California, Arizona, and Las Vegas) gets together for encouragement and trainig. Intern lunch at 12, meetings start at 2pm, and the conference goes until Friday noon-ish. Then it's time to prep for ~230 students to show up for our Crossroads Conference, where students will be trained on how to make decisions to glorify God as they prepare for graduation- so that they will live missionally no matter what career path they choose to take. That'll go until Sunday.

CRAZY! Fortunately, we get next week off (we'd get most of it off anyway because of Thanksgiving) to regroup before going into our final week on campus for 2009.

But it's all been so good! God's been so good to us in helping us plan the Conference, Cross '09 was so encouraging, and we're excited to have the biggest number of students registered for Crossroads ever. But please do be praying!