Truth and Dare

If there is anyone still out there reading my blog (I know you're out there Grandma!), I apologize for my absence for the past few months. Blogs are an interesting thing. They're really exciting at first and then they just become a lot of work to maintain and update. I'm continually impressed by my wonderful sister-in-laws (and on a few rare occasions my brother) who are the models of consistency in the blogosphere. I am really thankful for Krista and Michelle's (and sometimes Brady's) blogs because it keeps me up to date on their lives. I love the pictures and reading about all the exciting and not so exciting things that they do.

That being said, I realize that I have been selfish in not letting you all into the happenings of my life. Therefore, I am blogging right now and hopefully will continue to do so on a semi-regular basis for the next few months (no promises once I leave Fiji).

First I need to get you caught up on what's going on in Fiji and this post will be dedicated to our Student Conference which took place roughly one month ago.

If you haven't heard yet, our ministry at the University of the South Pacific was "kicked off" campus at the end of last semester (more on that to come in the future posts). In my mind, this was an extremely unfortunate and momentum-killing event. At the time, we had 30 American college students here to help us with a ministry and seemingly nothing for them to do since they were disallowed onto campus. We were also gearing up for the biggest event of our year: Student Conference.

In the meantime, the hotel that we had made a booking with for the conference informed us of a few problems. The manager of the hotel ran away with our deposit and the owner expected us to repay it in order to have our conference there.

After an emergency trip to the western part of the island, we secured an alternate venue for our conference three days before the conference started.

I was extremely skeptical about what to do and whether it was really worth the time and effort to put the conference on this year. But God showed me just how feeble and incorrect are my plans and the way I think things should happen.

Despite everything going against us, we had 140 local students show up to conference! To give you a reference point, that's nearly double the amount of local students who came to last year's conference.

It was a smashing success. The students had the time of their lives, heard the truth about God and His word and were commissioned to go out and reach their families, friends, campuses and the world with the Gospel. I had extremely low expectations coming into the conference and was absolutely blown away at how things turned out. It's a good thing that I'm not in control.

Anyway, I've used up too many of my words for the day so here are some pictures for your enjoyment. Please pray for these people as they continue to process what they learned at conference. Second semester begins today and I'm so excited to see how they respond to all of the opposition they're receiving at USP.