Busy Weekend!

I got a real workout as a Lutherpalian this weekend. In case you weren't aware the Southwestern Conference of the Upstate NY Synod of ELCA hired me just over a year ago to do basically the same thing that I do for the diocese. It is a "part time-part time job" but it helps fill in the gap while my position is still 80% of full time.

I started with a concert by Captive Free (Captive Free is a music ministry of young people through Youth Encounter. They give up a year of their lives to tour and play and minister. This is the group that I met this weekend, and This is a group that has a young friend of mine - Brice - touring with them. I've met both bands and their great young people!) and then followed that up with an overnight.

Honesty time - overnights are my LEAST favorite part of youth ministry. You can mess with just about any part of my routine and I can deal. Except my sleep routine.

The youth were very cool and I got about 5 hours sleep. On the whole I had a good time.

On Sunday I went back to Bethel to lead a class on Choice with their confirmation class and then worshiped with the congregation. Managed not to embarrass myself this time (don't ask).

Then it was off to Hamburg for the Core Workshop with Mark Ostreicher from Youth Specialties. I've come to be very impressed with Marko from reading his blog He just struck me as my kinda guy. He lived up to that at Core.

I will note that I expected him to be taller. Don't ask me why, but that was my thought when I saw him. In fact Marko was virtually the first person to speak to me at Core. He noticed my YS messenger bag as I was signing in. No, I was not trying to suck up. It's my day to day briefcase. The other thing that struck me about Marko (other than his intelligence and wit....OK that was a suck up)was that there's a certain Jerry Garcia quality to him. Sort of 21st Century indie rock kind of Jerry Garcia. Don't know why, just kind of struck me.

Felt sorry for him as the workshop went along. The Sabres playoff game was on TV and they were showing it on the TVs scattered around the youth center we were using. Well as the game headed into overtime there was shall we say a certain reluctance to head back in to the sessions. In the end the workshop worked out better than the game did (we lost 2-1 in double OT). We take our sports very seriously here in WNY.

At least it was fairly warm (yes Marko mid-50's is fairly warm for days in April round here) for his visit. Snow would not have been out of the question.

Kinda glad the weekend is over however.

Peace