Hello!

So it’s been 8 months since my last update. Things have been busy to say the least.

What brings on this sudden jump back into blogging?? Four letters…

NYWC!

Yes, the blog is back and conveniently in time for The National Youth Workers Convention. This year, we, The Bridge Youth Ministries, are driving all the way to Cincinnati, Ohio (Crazy to make a 10-12 hour drive? Yes, I know). Instead of flying this year, we are saving money by taking a bonding adventure from NJ to OH. Sad to say that many of the veterans from last year will not be accompanying us this time, such as: Samantha, Sully, Jefferson, Armando, Jenn, Sarah, Kevin, Elliott, and possibly Romulo. For those of you who met us last year, here are a few reasons why some of them are not returning: Samantha is finally a school teacher and just got engaged a few days ago, Sarah and Kevin had their first baby girl, Sydney; Elliott is also a school teacher this year, and Jenn is now the principal of a K-8 gifted and talented school. Veterans returning this year are: me (of course), Carlos (our youth pastor), Billy, Jesu, Manny, and hopefully Ali. We also have some newbies attending this year: Michael, Jenifer, Raul, Alex, and hopefully Sonia. So as of now, 9 definites with 2 possibilities will be making the long trek 1/4 across the country. Pray that we grow together, laugh together, catch some shut-eye, and not make each other crazy on the journey. :)

As for other updates, I’m still a preschool teacher in the same school, still happily single, still going through the rollercoaster ups and downs of life, mentored Jenn - a young youth pastor, through Tim Schmoyer’s free YM Mentorship program, started piano lessons, enrolled into Light University for biblical counseling, went to the WorshipGod conference in MD, and led worship for a week at T.I.M.S. thanks to Brian Ford for the invite (had a blast, met new people and learned a new game called Swat!), and just recently joined our young adult church’s (The Connection) worship team.

My roles in youth ministry have expanded. Last time I blogged, I was currently the worship director for our youth band, emerging worship station coordinator, small group leader for an all-girls group, and minute taker for leadership meetings. Last year (August08 - July09), I also took time off from being deeply involved in our youth groups unless they needed me for ratio purposes.
This year, while I am still working as a “full-time” unpaid volunteer, I was hired by my youth pastor as “part-time” to be his administrative assistant. As for my “full-time” volunteer responsibilities? I’m still the worship director for the youth band, but now have an assistant worship director to help lighten the load. I am still the emerging worship station coordinator but no longer doing “worship stations” every single month, but every 3-4 months, for our youth church, The Sanctuary. I am no longer a small group leader for the all-girls group because after 3 and a half years of being together, my girls have graduated from HS and moved off to dorm at college for a year. They intend on moving back for the remainder of their education so they can also be leaders-in-training for the youth ministry. Our last adventure was a trip for piercings (ears, nose, and eyebrow) followed by a rainy trip to the beach. So much crazy fun lol. New roles include being the stage manager for our youth church and young adult church services and being the head admin for the YouthTracker system (I’ll blog about that another time since my Twitter friend, Todd Porter, asked me about it via Facebook). So it’s been pretty busy since September.

As for youth group, I went from being “on-call” like last year to “I’ll come twice a month” to “I’ll be here every week”. We have 10 youth groups now: 5 Bridge Jr groups and 5 Bridge Sr groups. I’ll blog about that another time as well since my Twitter friend, Chris Day, was asking me why we do this instead of focusing on one youth group. We finally have an official I.D. system up and running within our youth ministry. The youth love the ID’s because it gives them a sense of belonging within their youth group, it gives us the opportunity to keep learning their names when they show us their ID card at the door, it gives the youth fun discounts on our events or at the “Bridge&Noble” store, and we’re working with the community to give us store discounts on pizzarias, coffee shops, etc. around the neighborhoods.

Eventually, I will have to discuss the accomplishments and failments of my New Years Resolutions I posted earlier this year.

Until next time, I hope you enjoyed my blog comeback of amazing updates (lol). Time to continue tackling my pyogenic bacterial conjunctivitis (pinkeye).

PS: thank you, Patti Gibbons, for your “like” on my “Janelle is blogging” Facebook status. ;)

lol so… this is going to be the first chapter of anything crazy I might do. It’s not much I do something crazy honestly. I’m rather reserved and quiet. So here is one crazy thing I’ve done and this was during the National Youth Workers Convention in Pittsburgh, PA. I’m just going to steal the “About” portion from Billy’s Vimeo page and paste it below (www.vimeo.com/williamhartz)

 
NYWC: Suffering for the Ministry from William Hartz on Vimeo.

So, in the exhibit hall at NYWC there are hundreds of vendors and organizations to talk to that may help you to run or enhance your youth ministry. Often times these exhibitors give away various things as gifts or prizes. And then there are some make you work for it. This is a story of just such an instance.
SermonSpice.com is a website that provides downloadable videos to enhance messages. There’s some great stuff on there. Well, at their booth they had a challenge offered to anyone who dared. There were three kinds of hot pepper of increasing heat intensity. If you ate a pepper they would give you a SermonSpice t-shirt and coupons for free videos from their site. I accepted the challenge myself and then made it a goal to get the rest of our team to do the same. This is the experience of Janelle and Jesus with SermonSpice’s chili pepper contest.

nywc.com
sermonspice.com

That extra hour of sleep was awesome! I woke up this morning feeling like I slept great. So when I woke up at the sound of my alarm this morning, I was fine with getting up to make it to Conversation and Connection: People who Lead Worship Bands. I went to represent Refuge, Jesu went to represent the spanish band, and Armando went to represent the Connection band. We split up into different groups to discuss various things. One question was, “how do you get your kids on the band to have a worship attitude instead of an “its all about me” or whatever attitude?” People suggested devotional time or a book to read from. I wanted to tell them what I’ve observed over the past 3 years of being the worship director.  One is worship music. I’ve noticed a definite change in my team when they walk into rehearsal with worship music already playing in the background. Music completely changes the atmosphere of the room. Worship music sets the tone. My team members won’t come into the Sanctuary for worship rehearsal yelling and laughing and joking around if the worship atmosphere is set. God’s presence is in the room.  The second thing is personal reflection. Sometimes we come to rehearsal or church with so much on our minds that we’re stressed out or still dealing with whatever happened during the day and it’s amazing what some quiet time will do for us as individuals. Sometimes its writing a letter to God, other times its reflecting on a verse or two, answering a personal question. There is so much I still want to implement in our rehearsals but get so busy I end up forgetting.  But I want to work on that again.  And as always, before and after rehearsal, I feel its important to pray together as a group whether its short or long. So yeah, the first two things I was dying to say to our circle group but… I couldn’t! lol One person told me I should have just jumped in, but everytime I opened my mouth to start speaking someone else beat me to it. So then they said, well what about raising your hand, but I didn’t think we were in school lol. It was kinda frustrating. Oh well, at least whoever reads my blog can hopefully benefit from this.

Breakfast time thanks to Jesu. If it weren’t for him, I would have went another morning without breakfast. We stopped by the Brown Bag deli but they are closed on Sunday so we stopped at the Panini and Pizza place in the Westin and ordered amazing bagels! (:

General Session five… started off with Talent: an amazing feat from the Living Illusions crew where she was locked and handcuffed in a clear cylinder of water. It was remarkable to watch her the entire time and of course the anticipation builds as Linkin Park’s “Crawling In My Skin” played in the background (music moves you!).  The Skit Guys were hilarious as usual. Artist: Shane and Shane – again they did a marvelous job.  Speaker: Mark Yaconelli. He did a great job! He talked about what we learned from Dan Webster’s Leading from the Pages of your Life when he talked about if you are doing something in the church that makes you tired, makes you irritable, and sucks the life out of you, then that’s not God.  I loved his story about the night dance and how he ended it with actually doing the disco to “You’ve Got The Best of My Love”, shimmering disco ball and all.

During the session I found out that out of the 5 people going back to Jersey, 3 changed their minds and swindled their way out of going to classes and taking tests lol and are now staying. I quickly realized that there was room for one more person in the van, not three. So I squashed the dilemma before the dilemma became and three of us girls took out clothes for our last day tomorrow and any other necessities and sent our bags a-packing with the remaining two team members that needed to leave today. Yay for quick thinking. It wasn’t until after that we (myself, Billy, Samantha, Jenn, Romulo, and Sarah) went to eat lunch at Subway. There we discussed Rock Band and tattoos. (:

Our Rock Band discussion prompted our arrival at the YS Store Rock Band area where I proceeded to do vocals for the very first time for that game for the song Maps by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. Jenn was on drums, Romulo on guitar, some random youth worker on bass. It was fun. Like I tweeted at the time, Amy would have been proud.

I decided once again to skip a seminar but that’s ONLY because during the convention, the seminar that I previously planned to take at this time was Crystal Kirgiss: From Youth Room to Dorm Room: Helping Your Students Prepare for College for the simple fact that my One Way Turn girls are all seniors this year, but alaz, they switched it to day two and I was already planning on taking Soul School which made me regret going to Soul School instead of Crystal’s class. Rar. So yeah, I walked around the exhibit hall, uploaded my blog post to my site at the YMX booth, got a free shirt thrown at me and land in my arms as I walked by lol. The girl who was trying to catch it saw it happen and said, “nice…” ha.  I ended up catching up with exhibit hall peeps and tweeps and lost track of time and didn’t go to the other seminar I planned on going to which was Mark Yaconelli’s The Dark Night of the Soul: When God is Absent. Later on I found out that Jesu went and said it was the best seminar he’s been in for the entire convention. I’m so glad to hear that, especially from the newbies… To hear how much this conference has impacted and challenged them. I love that.

The exhibit hall comes to an end. Samantha and I helped break down the YMX booth a bit, I went back to WorldChangers booth and picked up a pile of shirts for our kids back home and grabbed some Etnies flip flops from the 30 Hour Famine booth since they were giving them away as well.

General Session 6… Talent: Living Illusions (great), The Skit Guys (hilarious, especially the ad-libbing). Artist: Kendall Payne – oh, she cut her long pretty hair! Maybe it was crazy hot over the summer? So she went back to her first album look. Her first two songs were amazing and caused me to buy her album and she signed it for me. Jenn already found me blogging this now and asked me to learn “I Will Give You Love” to sing it in the Sanctuary one of these days. Tony Jones was the speaker and I must admit I wasn’t paying attention much. They lost me after the song and dance unfortunately. Worship: David Crowder Band – as usual absolutely amazing. And being surrounded by a family of youth workers singing in unison to our astounding God is simply amazy (that’s my word for crazy amazing…reserved for only specifically rare crazy amazing circumstances). My favorite one-word was during the song “You Are My Joy” and when we all sang the last word of “joy” together. My favorite part (not in You Are My Joy) is “Oh and everything will change, things will never stay the same, we will never be the same…” ah, what a song lyric… especially for someone who struggles with believing that things will never stay the same… sigh. Still working on that.

Right now… I’m at the Internet Access booth finishing up this blog post for today (yay!) and trying to ignore the cacophony of the band “Lost and Found” behind me.  I’m sorry, they are simply not my cup of tea. And YS is pretty smart having them go first and make all the YWs sit through them waiting for the Skit Guys. And for those of you who do enjoy them… better you than me, my dears.  Oh my gosh. Now they are doing Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Please stop. Please. This has got to be worse than Adam’s Christian mimes! Except for the fact that he has pictures. Lol  no… now the guy next to me is singing along…

I’m not ready to go home tomorrow. Not ready to go back to reality really… back to the things I let this Convention be my escape from (and for those of you back home who are reading this, don’t be offended, its not about any people). Well tomorrow is another bunch of seminars, none of which appeal to me which means I’m skipping out again, but you know what, I had an amazing time here this Convention and honestly the critical concerns course, most of the general session talks, and most especially the Twitter connections and discussions amongst other YWs made this weekend for me. The only thing I’m dying for YS to add to next year’s line up of seminars is “Worship Leading”. Please guys, not a little “People who Lead Worship Bands” Connection group. But a worship leader class where its about leading, how to lead (and not put on a show), letting the Spirit flow and being flexible to that, and most of all – have a time of worship where we all sing and worship God together, maybe even let us lead songs – who cares if someone might be good or bad. Honestly if they are bad, then you can even tell them they are not supposed to be leading worship and you have no idea how they got the job unless they are working in a senior citizens church, get my drift… lol

Okay, I’ve endured way too much of this Lost and Found band! :\ Time to post and be out!

Until tomorrow everyone.

keep smiling.be love

I slept in today! But unfortunately it seems to have done more harm than good. I awoke feeling groggy and fighting a headache. Bleh.  But after blogging last night until 2am and losing the post lol I needed to catch up on sleep I thought.

Bought some stuff at the YS Store today: a black BE shirt and a book I was completely drawn to: How To Help Your Hurting Friend – Clear Guidance for Messy Problems by Susie Shellenberger.  It was previously released as Help! My Friend’s In Trouble which I vaguely remember. Somehow, the title change did a world of good.  I want to implement this into my all-girls small group, One Way Turn for this final year since all of my girls are seniors in high school and will be going off to college in September.

General Session Thr3e… Worship: Starfield – awesome again. Talent: Ron McGehee (good) and Marquis Laughlin (good). Speaker: Francis Chan – compelling! (borrowing the word from Sara). He brought up tough questions about how we portray Jesus to teens.  I absolutely loved the part of talking about the Parables and how Jesus wrote them purely to confuse people. Because the one’s who are true seekers will ask questions and chase down understanding. He talked about being salt to flavor the earth and if you are lukewarm in between, you have absolutely NO USE, NO VALUE at all. I love loved his description of when Jesus says that when you are lukewarm with no use to anyone, you are not even fit to be with a pile of manure. It’s like if you sit on a piece of crap, Jesus says get off!! You’re ruining that crap! I have use for that, it will fertilize the soil, but you… you who is half-hearted and in between, you have no use at all. That’s amazing. And that’s what I long for (again!) a new perspective on God and His Word and Jesus! What an awesome session!

Twitter lunch was cool. Myself, Sara, Billy, and Jesu went to the Westin. I got a toasted cheese sandwich from the Brown Bag Deli. Got to meet Chris (@coffeewithChris). Then we swung over to the exhibit hall where we went to the SermonSpice booth where you were challenged to eat a chili pepper in order to get money for video products from their website and a black or red shirt. There are three levels of “hotness”. I took the lightest pepper and Jesu took the hottest pepper! That stuff is freakin crazy! Billy captured it all on video of course, including Jesu running to the bathroom and the tears uncontrollably running down my face. Lol  As a reward for our extreme antics, I received a black shirt which reads on the back “I earned this shirt” and Jesu received the coveted red shirt that reads “I REALLY earned this shirt.” :P

Seminar Series 3… I didn’t go to one. Not because I was being lazy, but there wasn’t anything I would have actively used in the ministry areas I’m in, so I utilized my time by purchasing a gift for my dad for Christmas (hope he likes it lol) and stopped by the YMX booth where I finally got to see Patti (@pattigibbons). Then later on, I find out that I already met Adam McLane (@mclanea) and didn’t even know it!  Sara went back to her hotel for a siesta and I walked around Pittsburgh. Took some pictures and stopped by Starbucks. Twas fun. Proceeded to spend more time in the exhibit hall where I hung out at various twitter friend booths and talking to random people I met earlier or brand new. Definitely not me… this exhibit hall brings some kind of startling confidence out of me. Lol such things.

I won something! VChurches was doing their big giveaway and they called my name from the computer list and I became a contender for the possible $1,000 drawing. So myself and this other girl had to draw a playing card. VChurches rep chose one and said whosever card was closest to his would win. He drew an Ace of Hearts.  I held a 4 of clubs and she held… a 3 of diamonds.  Ahhh! So I lost the chance at the cash drawing but I went away with the consolation prize which is just as amazing to me lol a $50 gift card to Starbucks! And you guys know how much I love Starbucks and their hot chocolate. Now this will give me more of a reason to trying Chris’ wife’s favorite: The Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate. (:

Dinner was pizza back at the hotel. And Pepsi. Oh, beloved cold sparkling carbonated amazing Pepsi. <3

There was a nice blog talk with Jenn and Sami in the hotel room before heading off to the general session.

General Session Fo’… yay for beforehand, I “officially” met Adam and also Matthew McNutt (@matthewmcnutt). Billy told me about how liveblogging works and its awesome and looks like so much fun. (: So as far as I know now, I have officially met 10 Twitter tweeps in this weekend alone. I heart Twitterrrrrrr. Lol  okay okay, back to the General Session. Worship: Matt Maher (good), Talent: Taylor Mason (hilarious as usual). Artist: Mercy Me (great). Speaker: Phyllis Tickle. She’s a smart cookie, and I learned that what we do as a church now will mold and create what the church will be 500 years from now. Scary stuff. Other than that, mucho history is not my cup of tea. But that’s okay, not everyone loves everything. I enjoyed my time on the YS Store couch conversating with my sister, Carly, through text. (:

Late Night Option…  As always for the past years of being at the National Youth Workers Convention, we participate in the Comedy Hour. This year was the usual Taylor Mason accompanied by Dave & Brian, Ron McGehee, and Joby Saad. Funny stuff from Taylor Mason, very glad that he has a brand new character followed by new material!  I didn’t see any of the comedians before him because I was backstage with Billy and soon later, Jenn, getting a backstage green room tour compliments of Adam McLane. He’s a great guy with a passion for youth ministry. I hope we’ll get to work with him more often through networking and such.

So that’s day three! We’ve got two more to go.

Loving the extra hour of sleep tonight. Hope you enjoy it too.

keep smiling.be love

Good day, good day.

Seriously.

First up, the rest of the CCC: Leading from the Pages of Your Life by Dan Webster.  Oh wait, maybe I should mention that I slept in as long as possible before having to get up and get to this class which = no breakfast. ha. anyways, the rest of this class was… how can i put it… phenomenal?  Honestly, if i leave this convention with only what i learned from this class, it is enough.  I absolutely recommend anyone and everyone to take this Critical Concerns Course whenever you hit up NYWC. I dont want to spoil it for anyone but i just have to write about what i learned from it for everyone else who is unable to attend NYWC. 

Yesterday we went over one of the two key points: 1. Take time to listen to (someone you are conversing with) their life.  And we did the timeline that i mentioned in the previous post.  Today’s key point was 2.Understand the two life-long works of leader development. 

A. Get clear on the work that has your name written on it.    
B. Grow your heart, soul, and character.

With that said,
                           Truly successful people…

 * develop a set of competencies/skills.  This is simple: Master your craft! Take classes, go back to school, learn! It’s never too late to continue learning. Don’t be lazy thinking you know it all. You don’t. Young or old, I look up to every person that pursues knowledge and growth.

* build relationship alliances that take their life (and friend’s life’s) impact to a multiple.  This is quite simple as well: cultivate relationships with people who are positive and encouraging. Allowing yourself to be surrounded by consistent negativity is damaging to your soul, your spirit, and your life. It’s important to envelop your self with support, accountability, and friendship.  And it’s amazingly two-fold. It’s not about what you can get out of it, but how you can pour into them and in return they will pour into you.

     *  develop enough character not to blow it all up. This is the toughest part of becoming a successful person. Responsibility brings out the monster within us and when we encounter obstacles, whether its rejection, failure, defiance from others, fear, stuff just doesn’t work out like you planned, etc, it’s up to us to develop enough character not to explode in anger or crumble into a huge mess. Everything that we’ve built up about ourselves can shatter in an instant in a lapse of controlling your emotions. So strive to allow yourself to feel the hurt, the anger, the fear, whatever it may be and at the same time, not let it control you.

Here’s where it gets more personal: Ask yourself these three alignment questions.

1. Where is the life/joy? What are the things that light up your world when you talk about them, what are the things you love to do, what makes you come alive? *Go deeper and keep a journal for 30 days and track all of your alive moments.
2. Where’s the fruit/impact? Where did God take your efforts and make it more than you ever could?
3. Where’s the affirmation? What are things that people notice about you? What can you do with relative ease that most people struggle doing?  What is it that makes people ask you, “how do you do it?” and all you can do is shrug your shoulders and say, “I don’t know, it just comes to me.”

Mind-blowing stuff if you ask me. I challenge you, if you are reading this and you don’t know what you are supposed to do for the rest of your life, answer those questions. And if you already know what you want to do, answer them anyway, because the worst thing in the world is pursuing something that your heart is not into. By doing so, you’re only hurting yourself, others who could be touched by your gifts, and your capacity to be used to your fullest potential. Talk to a mentor or leader.  Take classes, cultivate relationships, develop character.  I assure that your life will become an amazing adventure. I’m so confident in this, that I’ll give you a 30-day money back guarentee if you are not satisfied. lol 

So! After that course, I checked out about half of the exhibit hall with Samantha (@milagrosfarias for those of you who Twitter).  Met up with Todd (@thesnuffy) at the YMX booth before heading over to Subway where we ran into Nadim (@simplyinsider) and realized that we met earlier in the hotel the day before. Very good. My best friend Ali would appreciate that I ate a 6inch Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich. Lol That seems to be our Sunday find dining choice in between our youth service and the young adult service.

General Session Uno… Worship: Starfield – amazing. Glad to have this for multiple sessions this year. Artist: Newworldson – loved it. Talent: Amena Brown – I love her, but we missed hearing her speak because we were stuck at Subway. And Joe Castillo whom I call the sand story guy.  Wow.  His sand story on the Prodigal Son nearly brought me to tears.  That was the best sand story of his that I have ever seen. Speaker: Mike Pilavachi – Engaging and animated. I saw him do the same teaching two years ago at NYWC Austin, but it was still cool.

Seminar Series 1… I went to Jeanne Stevens “Soul School” class, stayed for about a half hour before I got up and left. Not because I hated the class because in fact, Jeanne is a wonderful speaker despite the evil curse of the word “um” that seems to be upon her. But in my opinion (and its only my opinion peoples), there was too much talk and not enough soul nurturing application unless you call “hey, now turn to the person next to you and choose which one of these three points applies to you and why, you’ve got 5 minutes”. And sitting next to someone who was clearly more uncomfortable and closed up than I was made even attempting to engage in conversation like pulling out nails with my bare hands. And I’m not very open myself. After leaving, finally met up with Sara (@saraeden) and met her friends Colleen and Tyler. Also met Brian (@exposed2Jesus) and John (@studentministry).

It’s Sarah’s 28^th birthday today and we went out to dinner at Little E’s Lounge which is above Mahoney’s in Pittsburgh.  Very nice, quaint little spot with an instrumentalist or small band, kinda like a coffeehouse but restaurant. Sarah got a birthday serenade. I had a $7 cheeseburger which…how do I put this… was completely worth the $7. If anyone here is looking for a great place to eat with great food worth the money and side entertainment in the background, this is the place for you.

General Session Dos… Worship: Starfield – don’t know. Lol we got stuck at the restaurant because they messed up some of our separate checks. And with a party of 14 (three married couples) that’s 11 checks lol so we were nice about it because most restaurants try to refuse that.  Speakers: Andrew Marin, Margaret Feinburg, and Soong-Chan Rah – so because of the restaurant mix up, we also came in on the tail end of Margaret’s question and answer portion. But Andrew Marin and Soong-Chan Rah did an awesome job with their talks. I especially enjoyed sprawling out on the YS Store floor with some of my team and chatted with Jesus (@Jesu7) (and like Marko said, I mean Jesus the youth worker, not Jesus Christ). We discussed much of what Marin and Rah were talking about so it was great.

Afterwards, myself, Sami, and Sara walked over to Sara’s hotel (William Penn) and enjoyed comfy couches and chairs and had hot chocolate and laughed and sat in silence. Good times. (:

Back at the hotel, Jenn and Sarah and I debated Marin’s talk about homosexuality and the church. Now I just want to say that its this kind of stuff that I long for: debating discussion, wrestling with statements, notions, ideas and conversing amongst each other without opinion pressure. So we talked and then I began my blogging. I was instructed by her to blog about what I brought into the discussion that she responded to with “that’s deep, I love that.” Lol  so here it goes.

In discussing listening to Marin’s question and answer portion, I was fascinated by one of the questions which pretty much asked how do we minister to gay and lesbians in the youth group? And Marin’s answer was pretty much “the same way you minister to the heterosexual youth in your group.” (completely paraphrasing obviously). And really, how crazy… how crazy and messed up are some churches that seek out people with ‘simple sin’ (that’s what Jenn loved the most). Seriously though, it’s like these churches open the doors to the public but screen their congregation. It’s like they say: Oh, you are bitter? Come on in, we’ll talk about forgiveness. Oh, you’re hurt? Come on in, we’ll talk about healing.  Oh, you are a normal unsaved person? Come on in, we’ll talk about Jesus. But if a homosexual comes to their “open door” then they say: Oh… you’re gay/lesbian? Um… I don’t know, I don’t think you should be here. God says homosexuality is an abomination and we follow God’s word here. Oh… you’re a prostitute? Uh… yeah, I don’t think this is the right place for you.  Oh… you’re what we want to call “abnormal, too hard to save, too much to deal with” sinner? Yeah… we can’t help you.  In discussing this with Jesu, he said, “Church is like a hospital and its like someone with leukemia comes up and wants help, but the hospital says no, we can’t help you.” That’s crazy. That’s…church? That’s messed up.

Well this is my second attempt of blogging this very post since last night after working on it for 2 hours, it vanished and I was panic-stricken until I realized… yeah I wasn’t getting it back.  So here it is again. (: Hope you enjoyed it if you even made it this far. If you did, mad props to you! Do you use “props” here?  No? Okay, it’s like “kudos” or like “getting a pat on the back”. (that’s for all you General Session Oners!) :P

keep smiing.be love

My hotel room is dark and quiet as i type by the light of my Macbook as it is after midnight and everyone is asleep but me.   Day One of NYWC was great. :)

After breakfast/lunch at a diner a few blocks away, we decided to take the Monongahela Incline which is an inclined railway going up and down the mountain. From the top you can see an amazing view of Pittsburgh. You all can see pictures of this adventure at Billy’s Flickr. Also at the top, some of us crazy ones had soft serve ice cream. ;)
And boo to the slow internet that won’t let me post a picture here…
Anyways. 

We hit up the Convention Center for NYWC Registration after a great nap at the hotel. We have 4 newbies with us. The theme this year is ridiculous… lol seriously, i cant wait to see why in the world they came up with that. Me and Samantha checked out the YS Store before our CCC and can’t wait for the Exhibit Hall, especially because I’ll get to meet most of the Twitter tweeps there. 

So, my CCC: Leading From the Pages of Your Life by Dan Webster.  The first half of it was great!  I’m not a very social person when it comes to people I don’t really know so hearing that we had to split up into groups and talk made me want to run for the door lol. But honestly, it was good and we had a great group.  The part of the night that impacted everyone the most was the Timeline exercise. Dan had us look back over the past year and create a timeline of events from then to now. Positive experiences went above the line and negative experiences went below. Then we each took turns within our little group of 3 or 4 and discussed our timeline. Many said the experience was freeing and enlightening. We all appreciated each other sharing their personal story and everyone was able to relate to some piece of their life. One of the most amazing aspects to be reminded of is that we’re not alone. And to hear each other’s stories of how they got through some of their trials and struggles was really encouraging. Also, to hear the input from each other as well as ask some tough questions really made the whole activity worthwhile. And it’s only the first half of the course! I would definitely encourage anyone to attend this Critical Concerns Course if you are attending NYWC in Nashville later on in November or when they offer this course next year. 

Afterwards, our group met up in the lobby and proceeded to grab some food. We ended up at Primanti Bros. Restaurant and Bar. I had cheese fries.  :p

Tomorrow is Sarah’s 28th birthday! yay. We’ll have to hit up the Appreciation Station and post something for her. We’re celebrating with a card that everyone back at home signed for her and she gets to pick where we go out for dinner. Maybe a cake too.  I can post all this because she won’t read this ever… and if she ever does, it’ll be way later. :b

Time for sleep. Part two of CCC: Leading From the Pages of Your Life is tomorrow morning at 8:30am.

Night blog world.

keep smiling.be love

First off, I just want to say how much I love my Blackberry phone that it will allow me to post from here! Lol
With that said, ladies and gentlemen, we are here.

We arrived at the Marriott Courtyard last night around 3am. Let me say sleep was good.

And so apparently it’s a huge plus that the Pittsburgh Convention Center is directly behind the hotel.

We are in search of food and then our group of now 14 will be registering at the Convention. Then off to the Critical Concerns Course. I will be taking Leading From the Pages of Your Life with Dan Webster. Looking forward to that.:)

I’ll keep you guys posted.