Absent

I’ve been rather absent on my blog lately. That’s because I’ve been rather busy. This past week was spent making final preparations for the first GEMS Counselor workshop, which was held in Eastern Washington. It was a really busy week, since I had never led a workshop before. I spent a lot of time praying. AND I spent a lot of time practicing with Power Point, the new projector, and my laptop. AND I spent a lot of time practicing the workshops I was helping to lead with my amazing partner.

So on Friday morning I headed out. My first stop was Canada. Incredibly, our supplies we had ordered hadn’t been shipped in time, and while there was hope that the overnight delivery would arrive in time for the workshop, I thought we should have a plan B. I have a friend in Canada who had some extras of some very important supplies so I headed up there to borrow those from her. Then I loaded up my van and hit the road.

The “Change Oil” light appeared in my van, so I was a bit concerned the whole way (since I was driving a LONG ways, over the mountain pass!) but God provided and the oil gauge showed everything was OK. I stopped quickly at an outlet mall to make a return, but also found some much needed nice winter gloves for my dumb fingers that turn white and go numb in the cold weather. I got a bit tired while driving over the mountains, so called a friend and chatted for an hour, which woke me up and added some fun to the trip. I made it to the church for set-up with about 5 minutes to spare and was so thankful for safe travels! The first thing we did was go searching for our “overnighted” box of supplies and it was there! Yee haw! Not everything we needed was in the box, but it was a major improvement over what we had before!

Tami & I spent the evening setting up, It was a pretty late night, as this is the first workshop like this that we have done, and the facility was pretty tough to work with, but we were happy with the results. (Pictures will come later this week, I hope!)

I slept a few hours, which is more than I expected, so I was happy. In the morning we put up the balloons and signs and set up all the tech stuff. Thankfully, everything worked and I had no technical difficulties!

The workshop went great overall. Of course we thought of things that we should have said later, or ways we could have said things differently, or whatever, but the counselors seemed to enjoy themselves and seemed really grateful for the training and information they received! We had been praying that they would go away feeling equipped by God to teach their GEMS girls this year and I think they did!

On my way home when I was feeling tired, I called my brothers’ families and got to talk to one brother, one sister-in-law, and one nephew. :) I was home before 9:00, which was awesome.

Overall, God provided in so many ways, it’s impossible to even describe them all. I could only touch on the big ones here. Thanks to all of my friends and family who knew about my big weekend and prayed for us. I am sure God answered those prayers in ways we will never even know. We have to repeat the workshop on this side of the mountains this coming Saturday. I’m nervous in a different way about that one – there are A LOT of people I know at that workshop, including my fellow GEMS Counselors from  our church and fellow GEMS Counselors from our former church and fellow GEMS Counselors that I have just known for a very long time! The plan is to just keep praying and practicing and take the same relaxed approach to training these women that we had yesterday and lead them through the things that God wants to teach their girls through them.