Spring Conference – Day 1

Today was the start of the Josiah Venture Spring Conference, an annual event for all the missionaries to come and be together. The theme this year is “Family on Mission” and Dave Patty (the president of the organization) will be the main speaker. But as I sit here in my bed at the hotel with my family asleep around me, I’m just flat out tired.

We got an early start on the day because we needed to be out the door in order to make it here in time for music rehearsal (we live about 40 minutes from where we’re staying this week). Amazingly, we did leave on time and made it here but rehearsals didn’t go as planned today. I’m playing the drums and all in all it went just fine, but our music leader’s family all got the stomach flu so we had to improvise a lot of different things today to make music practice go well. I think we ended up rehearsing for a totally of five hours throughout today, plus we played the music during tonight’s session which as about another thirty minutes of playing. I haven’t played the drums in over a year, so my hands are hurting a bit and my legs are tired. However, despite my physical state I really didn’t enjoy playing worship music with a bunch of other missionaries. There are so many talented people serving in so many different countries. It’s pretty awesome.

It rained a ton today, so that put a bit of a damper (literally?) on things. If not a damper, it just made things a little more challenging. But tonight’s session was good and I felt like overall the conference is off to a great start. Above you can see a photo of Dave teaching and he mostly did an intro to his messages for the rest of the week.

After the main session and a long day, I ended up playing another hour or so of music with Zach and another missionary named Christy. We’ll actually be leading music tomorrow morning (yes, really) and I’ll be playing guitar. We’ll be there bright an early at 7:30am for rehearsal. I honestly hope I make it. My body is so tired at this moment that I’m not even sure I’ll have the energy to change out of my clothes!

I really don’t want my tired tone to affect how I felt about today. Playing music was a ton of fun and I’m so blessed to be able to serve that way this week. However, this has added some extra work to Bethany today which is double hard with her in the last weeks of pregnancy. The kids are excited to be here and for them a new place and new kids around is really exciting (I regret that I don’t have time to tell the story about how Titus got out of child care tonight and was running around the hotel crying).

So with heavy eyes I leave you in hopes that the next six hours of sleep will feel like ten!