Back home in Paris from conference

It's nice to be composing this from back home in Paris. It took us 7 hours to get back, a welcome improvement over the 9 1/2 hours that it took to get there. The kids did great, traffic flowed well, and we only got lost once. We even found "our favorite Irish restaurant" (McDonalds).

On the ride home, my wife and I talked about what our favorite parts of the conference were. She said that the excellent childcare was her first highlight. Our kids enjoyed the workers, as well as the other kids who were with them. My wife got to participate in most the the worship times and hear most of the talks.

Probably my favorite part of the conference was getting to network with colleagues with our organization International Teams. I remember discussions with IT workers in Australia, Canada, the U.S., England, Wales, France, Bosnia, Ukraine, Austria, the Netherlands, Greece, Romania, and some other places that I can't mention. I met many of them for the first time, as well as seeing others whom I've known for awhile.

I've had my ups and downs with our organization over the past 5 years. However, this conference definitely has been a positive one for us in regard to International Teams. There are some gifted and just plain nice people whom we got to be with at this conference. It was good to get a more Europe-wide look at the work.

I am particularly impressed with our Europe director, Bart Companjen and his wife Mathilde. They are both Dutch and served in cross-cultural ministry with another organization before joining IT. They are humble, hard-working, and very approachable people. Mathilde, in particular, ministered to my wife just at the right time last night.

I also got to talk about internship possibilities at several churches in Paris and how I.T. could help with the recruiting in particular. This seems like an open door for the future. I'm finally starting to envision the possibilities of recruiting and building a team in Paris around the arts, youth ministry, and a more emergent church type of team.

During the course of a discussion yesterday, I had to admit that I love networking. While it tires my wife, it's sometime that energizes me, especially when I'm able to help create connections between different people and ministries that I know.

After the rest of the family went to bed last night, I went to the campfire. One guy there was Paul Voltmer, who is from my church in Essex Fells, New Jersey and who was just in high school when I was 22 years old and working with that youth group. He now works in Austria. The scene around the campfire made me flash back to over 20 years ago when we were at Camp Orchard Hill in Pennsylvania for a freshman hunt. It's pretty wild when kids that you worked with in youth group aren't far off from age 40.

After the campfire, I ended up sitting in a circle drinking sparking cassis (black currant) soda with a group of 10 others until 2:00 a.m. It reminded me of college days. It turned out that I was the senior member of that group. One of them, Emma Skonsby, went through IT orientation with us in 1988 and now works in Athens, Greece with Lost Coin Ministries, which works with prostitutes.