The last few hours of Triennium in West Lafayette, IN meant packing. After breakfast, the adults check on the teenagers’ rooms. Then we store ALL our stuff in one room as we go to the final worship.
The Scripture was about the Ascension of Jesus, in Acts 1:6-11. The intent of the sermon, which was quite inspirational, is how do we make a difference in the world now. The subtext is that you don’t worry about that “heaven” stuff; it’ll take care of itself.
You know how you go to a meeting or conference and come back with all sorts of great ideas that fall to the side in fairly short order? I know it’s quite possible that could happen here too for some people. Yet the building blocks of most of the days gives me some hope that the some of the lessons learned will stick for a while.
At bare minimum, the kids from the Albany Presbytery made some new friends from other churches. I know my daughter is still texting a number of them a couple months later.
We depart, but we don’t go far, as we eat in town at some sandwich shop. Then on the road. We stop at Napoleon, OH for a bathroom break. I step off the bus and get blasted by a scirocco, a hot wind that was not at all refreshing, but rather, oppressive.
It becomes apparent that we’re going to get back to Albany far earlier than the promised 8 a.m. arrival. We stop for dinner in Ashtabula County, OH, recalibrate our trip, and determine we’re going to get home about four hours earlier. Time to call our rides with the news. Ah, the lightning strikes in front of us do not bring rain for us.
I knew this before, but it was reconfirmed: seeing four episodes of Scooby-Doo in a row will rot your brain, even if you’re not actively watching it.
We stop at Amsterdam c. 3 a.m., about 45 minutes from Albany, so two families don’t have travel as far. Then onto Albany. When we got back to the church parking lot, there was a lot of goodbye hugs. My wife took us home. My daughter and I blew off church that morning. In addition to the fact we were dead tired – I didn’t sleep at all that night – we had attended church five times since the previous Sunday, so we figured we had a little worship latitude.
Off-topic: Don’t know if you’ve looked in on Charles’ post from Tuesday, but Holly has a report after seeing him in the hospital last night.
I hope your plans and dreams after the conference come to fruition. Those mountain-top experiences are amazing, but it’s in the trenches where our faith really grows. Our church recently set out on a jubilee project to pay off medical debt in our county. You can check it out on my Facebook page as it’s too long of an explanation to put here. It was an ambitious project that, hopefully, will make a positive impact in the lives of others. Happy you are back home safe and sound.