I know I don’t talk too frequently about my job on here (I’m involved in this), but last night was such a crazy evening that I just HAVE to share.

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Last night was probably one of the most memorable nights of ministry at this school that I’ve ever had.  It all started with a hail storm at about 5:50 PM

This continued for quite a while, combined with 70 mph wind and lots of rain.

A student captured these photos on campus during the storm.  I was still at home trying to finish cooking dinner before heading over to campus for our weekly fellowship gathering, CW, when we lost power at about 6 pm.  Exciting!

Students started calling me, trying to figure out how to problem solve for the evening.  Plus, there were inconsistent reports of a tornado warning.  People couldn’t figure out what we should do:  Should we still meet?  How will we do worship without powerpoint? And sound?  Quick on our toes, some students ran over to the chapel and grabbed a bunch of hymnals, and I collected as many flashlights and candles (shhhh, don’t tell anyone!) as I could and headed over to campus.

On my way over, I saw lots of this:

There were many downed trees, and it was still quite stormy outside.  And still, no power.  As I walked towards the building where we meet, there was an exodus from the library because the building had closed for the day.  They were discussing what they should do now that they were “powerless” – I had to laugh a little bit inside.  My first thought was, “Come join us for CW!  You can’t really do much else in the dark, but you can pray and worship!”

Upon arriving early for CW, several students had gathered with flashlights and were arranging chairs into a circle.  We pushed a piano closer to the circle, and Kendall was practicing a few hymns for us to sing.  Nothing, not even a power outage, could keep us from gathering to fellowship and worship together!

I sent several students back to the JRC (the student center) and to their dorms to invite people to join.  Everything on campus was canceled, there was no power except for a weak generator providing power to the dining services facilities in the JRC, and students only had so much battery power left in the laptops and cell phones to keep them occupied.  So, Wadzi, Lauren, and Phyllis called friends and went around campus inviting people to come spend time with Jesus and join us for CW.  I figured that if Jesus can minister to the disciples in a storm at sea, we can go out into a rain storm and gather some friends for worship 

Around 8 pm, people started returning to begin CW.  But it was at this time that we got a text message saying that there was a tornado warning in effect, that one had been spotted close by, and that we should seek shelter immediately.  This is where things got interesting!

We gathered some hymnals, flashlights, and a djembe drum and all 20 of us scurried downstairs to the ladies bathroom, which is the lowest point in the forum.  And here, we had worship together!

We sang songs, prayed, and met with the Lord.  It was beautiful.

We were interrupted briefly by a few cockroaches – yuck! – but continued our time together, and eventually went back upstairs to finish CW together with a time of prayer and testimony sharing.  The Lord was powerfully at work during this time.  Students were confronted with their own inability to control circumstances and many of them were concerned about assignments or readings they wouldn’t be able to finish by morning.  But several student testimonies about God’s powerful work in them over spring break challenged us to pray and give over our burdens to the Lord.  I’ve never heard students confess and pray in such a way before!  It was amazing.

I’m so grateful for this night.  Even though it was a bit stressful and scary, the Lord was powerfully at work to meet students at this school in the middle of a near-tornado.  He may thwart our own plans, but God is good and knows exactly what we need.

She arrived yesterday in the midst of a crazy snow storm.  After ripping open the packaging, I set eyes on my beloved new bag…

She’s beautiful!  This picture does not do it justice (mostly because it’s taken with my pitiful P&S Canon that has a broken flash while my real camera is off to get fixed).  The green and blue colors are nice and bright, but not too punchy for my taste.  I decided to risk it and go with the white center panel, hoping and praying that it doesn’t get too dirty.  The pink logo was just a fun little extra I decided on – I thought it made the bag a bit more girlie, but not too much.  (For those who want details – this is the custom laptop messenger bag in size medium. It fits my 15 inch MacBook Pro perfectly.  The colors are peacock blue, white, and light green, and the logo is berry.  The interior liner is light blue.)

Let me tell ya, though – this bag is AWESOME.  It has soooooooooooooooooooooooo much room in it.  Way more than I expected.  I can fit my laptop in it, plus probably the equivalent of 6 or 7 books, PLUS all my cords and stuff for my laptop, plus my phone, pens, wallet, and other random things I carry with me every day.  There are all sorts of zipper and velcro pockets, inside and out, that make it super easy to organize everything.  Now I just have to remember what goes where!

There’s even a built in protective sleeve for my laptop!  My picture of it is all fuzzy and awful, so I’ll have to try again later when my office is brighter.  But I love that I can carry my computer with me and it’s super easy to get it in and out of the bag.  My previous bag made this absolutely ANNOYING due to the way it was designed.

So far, I’m loving it! Thanks to my father-in-law who gave me a gift card towards my new bag

I’ll try to get more pictures and a fuller review up sometime soon.  Have a happy Tuesday!

I have:

• Traveled to 2 weddings (and subsequently confirmed my superior choices in all things wedding – no judgement, I’m just reminded that I loved our wedding day the most!)
• Missed one family Christmas
• Flown through Minneapolis 3 times
• Eaten sushi twice
• Experienced 3 major historic blizzards in Iowa, Boston, and Minnesota
• Number of extra days spent in Boston due to historic blizzard: 2 1/2
• Spent one week in the Ozarks with co-workers
• Spent one week in St. Louis with co-workers
• Driven to Western Massachusetts to visit old friends (I totally miss all of the traffic on Route 9!)
• Only cooked one time for myself
• Rang in the new year at the Edward Jones dome in STL with 17,000 college student strangers friends at Urbana 09
• Spent a grand total of 13 days at home
• Missed DH more than ever!

It’s good to be home again.

  I just got back on Sunday night from my first major regional event since moving to Iowa.  Instead of having area conferences like in New England, we have regional ones, which are MUCH bigger.  We had students from Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska (actually, I don’t think we actually have any ministry in NE right now, but I’ll save that for another post).  There were 250 students there, plus about 35-40 staff, and let me tell you ,it was a PACKED weekend.  I came home absolutely fried.  And this picture of one of my students at Grinnell, Christina, perfectly describes how I felt yesterday after finally catching up on sleep.  

Christina actually had a pretty rough weekend – en route to Kansas City (where FC08 was), she was attempting to pass a semi-truck and ended up spinning off the interstate.  She was pretty shaken up, but she was fine, didn’t hit anything, and was actually able to drive right back on to the road.  Someone else drove the remainder of the way here, but still, I give her props.

We also had transportation problems on the way back – one of the students cars wouldn’t start.  We had to get a new battery, but it took us an hour to get the old one out.  While I expected to be back home around 5:30, I didn’t get home until almost 8 pm.  I was exhausted, tired, dealing with culture shock (there is such a thing as domestic culture shock).  Hence, this picture perfectly describes my weekend.  I’ll post more soon, since I was the official photographer for the weekend (more on that in another post).

So this weekend is our IV Fall Conference in Kansas City.  I’m co-leading a seminar with another staff and I need to do a little prep work – so I thought I’d turn to a few faithful blog readers for help.  Our seminar title is “Friendships and Dating”, which means we are the most popular seminar.  College students LOVE talking about this stuff.  Here’s our description of the seminar:

“Many of us come to college with the hopes of building lifelong friends and THE lifelong friend whom we hope to marry.  Unfortunately, most churches just preach abstinence from sex without any clear guidance with what it means to pursue platonic and romantic friendships.  This seminar is see if Scripture can give us greater guidance and principles that we can use for our modern relational milieu. Come ready to share your experiences and questions in this interactive gathering! ”

We’re going to do a little teaching time, a conversation about giving 100% vs 50/50, and then talk about the myths of marriage.  Now, as I’ve been thinking about our title and the fact that this is college students, I think we may want to include some myths about dating too.  To get my readers inspired, here’s our list of the Myths of Marriage.

1.  Guys, marriage isn’t the answer to all of your lust issues.
2.  Girls, marriage isn’t the answer to all of your insecurity/loneliness
issues.
3.  Your spouse will want to do the same things you want to do. 
(Especially if he/she was willing to do them while dating.)
4.  Your spouse will do things the same way that you do.
5.  Your spouse will be reasonable and make sense.
6.  Your spouse will always understand you.
7.  Marriage gets easier the longer you are married.  
8.  You will be able to resolve all of your conflicts.
9.  You will be able to change your spouse.

Here’s where you come in – reply back with any additions you might make to this list, AND anything you might put on a Myths of Dating list.  Let’s see what we can come up with!

Congrats to my good friend Patrick and my friend Lois (she’s my florist and DOC for our wedding) that just got engaged this week!  Their story of how they arrived at where they are now is pretty extraordinary and really a testament to God’s grace and redemption, and patience and obedience on both of their parts.  I’m so excited for them!  I think they’re getting married around here in the fall, so hopefully I can make a trip back for that special occasion.  This means that over half of our staff team is engaged – Patrick, Lois, Matt and me. Crazy.

Yesterday we got our engagement pictures taken – it was a lot of fun.  Very different being on the other side of the camera as a photographer myself.  Things were a bit more “posed” than I expected, but it was still fun.  We went up to Mt Tom and took some photos by this massive rock formation, on the swings, slide and teter toter (I felt like a little kid again) and by this cool old stone house.  Then we went over to the Log Cabin, the sister facility to where our reception will be, and had a few pictures there by the flowers that we hope we can use for our newspaper announcement.  Danielle was super fun and nice, and really easy to work with.  We can’t wait to see the pictures when they come in!  I’ll make sure to post a link when we hear back.

Today is wedding to do list day – time to mark those things off!!  Hopefully I can get lots done!

Oh, and DF is amazing and somehow scored us tickets for Red Sox game tuesday night against red hot Tampa Bay, and then next weekend we’re driving down to Phillie to visit friends, and on the way back we’re going to a Yankees game! I know I know, totally a wrong thing to do since I’m part of Red Sox nation, but they’re tearing down Yankee stadium, and so we wanted to see it in person before it’s gone.  Should be fun!!