WARNING: Long Verbiage Ahead View At Your Own Risk

Well, I am glad to report that we seem to have cleared Christmas, and the New Year.

From BS on the walls to our open house. From our Church Skiing Christmas party to our week of holidays we spent at home because the van had no brakes.

It seems that we have made it, clear into the year 2004. And God seems to be as good in this year, as he was last.

It feels a little strange right now, because usually at this time of the year I'm booking flights and getting guys to share a Hotel room with - wait, that sounded bad...

Usually at the Beginning of February, I'm off to Chicago where our group of churches has it's "Midwinter." A time for pastors to gather and swap stories and take some good classes and hear some very good speakers.

I'd like to say it's like a Shiners convention except of course without the funny hats and small mopeds, but I can't. I've never been to a Shiners convention, so I can't compare!

This year I'm not going, so that I can attend the denominational Annual Meeting in June. It's much too costly to do both, and this year my transfer to the Evangelical Covenant Church will be formalized. So I need to be there in June.

So I'm sitting here, and it feels like I should be doing something about Midwinter, but I don't have to.

It is really a huge blessing that the church enables me to attend this event.

I get to meet pastors. The guys with many of the same struggles as I have, from all over North America.

We meet one another and share our stories. We will eat a meal together and next year I look for them and hear updates of their lives. I think about them and pray for them throughout the year, and it's a huge blessing.

I met a black pastor who had been a child in the deep South through the 50's and 60's. The stories he tells me suddenly become real in new ways, because I know someone who's lived it.

Or the guy who's planting a church on the wrong side of the tracks down in California. His wife doesn't want to be there, it's dangerous for them, and their small children. And he struggles with his calling and his family.

Anyway, a lot of connections are made. And it's good.

And the speakers. Leighton Ford, Rod Johnston, Philip Yancey, Oz Guinness, Marva Dawn, Tom Bandy.

This year it's Robert Webber, Brian McLaren, Klyne Snodgrass, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Lloyd Ogilvie,

I'm droolin just thinking about it.

Then there's the little extras that happen as you are there.

One year a pastor from Wisconsin and I headed downtown to find some live Jazz, a personal weakness of mine. We came across a great little club that I try to get to every year since then. Two years ago I was there alone on the night off and who walks in and sits next to me but Nancy Sinatra. No kidding.

Then there's the time I somehow got invited over to the Covenant's Treasurer's house, and he does some work for Willow Creek, so he takes a few of us over and gives us the full tour for an afternoon. Later on, his neighbour, Miss. Illinois drops in to borrow a couple eggs. Yeah. No kidding.

Or a ride to the top of the tallest building, or some Chicago Pizza, or an hour spent at Moody Bible's bookstore where I bump into Henry Blackaby and tell him where I'm from and it's like old home week. (He helped start a church here in Prince Albert.)

Or when I met a waitress I knew from Prince Albert, there in the airport in Minneapolis waiting for our plane. Her boyfriend had just proposed, and she need to talk, and God came and met with us there in gate 5C. Tears poured out and God was all over the place, and it was a holy moment in time.

Dozens of small gifts, that God gives to us daily, he has blessed me with during this time each year.

Well, enough blabbing. I'm writing this from the local coffee shop. Lauralea was out tonight with a couple of ladies and the kids are home watching Malcom in the Middle, So off I went to drink coffee and read and write a bit.

Blessings.