So while I was at Winter Conference I was in the yamia 24hr room praying with some people on our team. I was to lead a workshop that afternoon on "Growing Your Soul While Working With Students"...a topic I have become very passionate about in the last few years...

As we were praying I had what I can only describe as an overwhelming sense of peace that God was in control and that He was going to accomplish exactly what He wanted to and needed to through the talk.

A very cool experience to say the least.

I am going to add an addendum to the talk though for clarity's sake but I am not losing any sleep over that...largely due to the aforementioned experience in the Lord.

God is good.

UPDATE ON TALKS FROM WC
All of our talks will be available soon in a podcast format. We will let you know as soon as we have them ready to go. Jason Miller (our Web guru and great teammate) has the work of getting them from cd to podcast. Juggling that, family and a full time gig means it will take a few weeks. Pray for him.

I come back from a fantastic time at Winter Conference to what....to this....

Anyone up for a little game of "caption"?

Day 1 is done... It was absolutely amazing.

Some folks throw that word around and it loses some of its power. That is not what I mean by it.

Our booth is really good and we have met a ton of youth workers and pastors.

We presented to all the network leaders in the mission (networks are like diocese in the Catholic Church) and it was a HOME RUN. Praise God. He gave us great favor.

Funny stories...
So our booth. We have this great banner, awesome posters and even a live scrolling presentation on youth culture. But we all forgot 1 thing... we forgot to put the words "youth ministry" on our display! We have yamia... but not everyone knows what the y stands for. We all got a laugh on that one. Maybe it is God's way of keeping us humble.

In other news... I was lead deacon at the opening service. Never done that before. I am pouring the wine into like 40 chalices while wearing my white robe. My robe is a really cool old school monastic robe so I have the hood and the really wide sleeves. So what happens? As I am pouring the wine my sleeve drops into some of the wine in one of the chalices! It soaked up like a 1/4 of one of the cups. Nice. Nothing I could do. The hotel is washing it... we will see if it comes out. I am just glad I did not knock over all the cups or something during this service with like a few thousand people.

OK... off to work the booth. I will have more later.

PS the opening worship service was by far the best one we have ever had at Winter Conference. The Spirit was present and moving. Simply amazing.

Here is the Zoephel Family in all its glory (Sara, Paul and I). Yes, that is the Gulf of Mexico in the background... God has been good to us. We have paid our dues, God has had us live in some very interesting places. The best part is that this pic was taken in December (that last line is for you Chicago folks).

Well, WC 08 is upon us. I am gonna be blogging from the conference. Hopefully we can have some cool pics and some funny stories up soon.

Talk to you in 5 days.