MCA Convention

In the past week, I spent almost 28 hours on Interstate 80. I wish that could be an exaggeration, but I fear that that's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. However, it was worth every minute of it! On Palm Sunday, Julie, Mary Lou and I began the great adventure east. We were on our way to Cannedensis (the place where Canadians Dance) Pennsylvania. This lovely little town in the Poconos Mountains is the home of Spruce Lake Retreat Center. This would be the backdrop for my first Mennonite Camping Association. Our featured speaker for the weekend was Bob Kobielush, the President of the Christian Camp and Conference Association. That's pretty much the top of the top of Christian Camping. The theme for the week was "Breaking Through Walls--Ephesians 2:14-17" The worship times were voth inspiration and educational. Way to go Bob!

In addition to worship times, there were 3 different workshop times. I loved these. I attended all programming workshops and loved brainstorming, sharing and laughing with all the other program directors. I can't help it that we are just a bunch of fun people! Through these workshops I learned the fine art of creating adventure and using it as a tool for ministry, I added to my list in progress of camp games and how to help campers and staffers process events that just happened. I took a lot of notes and I have a lot of new ideas. However, the best part of the workshops were the connections and relationships that developed out of our time together. Even though the workshop ended at 2:00 on Tuesday, the sharing, dialouging and learning didn't end until the last minutes of the the convention on Thursday.

It was also wonderful to be able to visit such a well established, fully developed and extensively staffed camp. They have 36 full time employees. 36! They are able to do so much programming because of this. I had to remind myself not to compare the programming schedules because the 6 of us are simply not able to do the work of 36. But it was inspiring to see what all they did and think about how we could bring that back to Crooked Creek.

As an added bonus, I met a lot of my extended family! I found a 2nd cousin, a cousin's aunt and a whole family of 4th cousins (some were once removed.) If I had thought that my days of making random Mennonite connections had ended when I finished college, I was proven wrong beyond reasonable doubt this week.

All in all, it 2 and a half days of convention were worth all 1,920(ish) minutes spent traveling.