James & Carolanne

Well, we're back from Crusade Staff Conference, and things are starting to settle back down to normal. The conference was really good. For those who didn't read about it, the Campus Crusade staff conference is a yearly event that is mandatory for all supported staff with CCC. This year it was held in Whistler, BC and was a great time of reuniting as a team, seeing how the Lord has been working across the various ministries within Crusade and learning more about the intended general direction of the organization as a whole.

For us personally, it was a great time to meet some new people, and spend some quality time with staff friends. We had a few late "Settlers" nights, along with some great sessions and fun games. During the course of the conference, we played a game called "Gotcha" where each person there was assigned the name of someone else at random, and you had to find and tag that person some time during the duration of the time we were there. If you managed to tag your "target", you then inherited their "target" and had to continue by tagging THAT person, and so on... The winner was announced on the last day, and that person had managed to tag somewhere around 20 people. (I got 2)

Of the speakers, our favorite was definitely Phil Callaway. We were in all three of his sessions.

An award winning author, speaker,
and TV host, Phil Callaway is known
worldwide for his humorous yet
perceptive look at the Christian life.
- StaffConference.com

The other special speakers were Mark Buchanan (author of "Your God Is Too Safe") and Paul Wartman (President of Columbia Bible College). Both Carolanne and I really enjoyed the time, as we were able to grow closer to the Lord and to each other. We found the trip to be energizing, encouraging and restful.

We DO have once concern about the trip... you may have read in my previous note, that we needed to raise about $2000 in order to cover the cost of the conference. Even though we have already paid for it, we would really like to be able to raise the support to recover the cost. Thank you for your prayers and your consideration in this.