Getting to the Catalyst Conference

This past week, Rudy, Chad, and I made our way to Atlanta, GA, for the Catalyst Conference. If you want to know why we chose Catalyst, it's because we started listening to Francis Chan's podcasts (from Cornerstone Church - just click on Media and you can listen, too. Currently I have 217 of his podcasts on my iPod and have been listening to him while I run) and the guy has completely blown us away. So we started looking for a conference where Francis Chan would be speaking.

We found Catalyst.

Not only was Francis Chan there, but so was Andy Stanley, Chuck Swindoll, Malcolm Gladwell, Rob Freakin' Bell, Tony Dungy!, Priscilla Shirer (Tony Evans' daughter), Dave Ramsey... Wow.

So we headed to Atlanta. Not actually Atlanta, but somewhere in the outlying universe. Getting to Catalyst was actually a lot more difficult than it sounded. No, the flight was fine. As was the hotel, somewhere about an hour away from downtown Atlanta (which is a great place to have a convention). The problem in getting there came on Thursday morning, as we left our hotel, 7 miles from the arena, with only 1 hour to spare.

It took us that full hour to get there. At least we found a radio station that played ALL METAL ALL THE TIME.

There is something wrong with the picture of a Church that is trying to be a good steward of the environment all jumping in our cars from our hotels all over the place and converging on the Gwinnet arena, but sitting in a exhaust spewing traffic jam for an hour to do so. Then to get into the arena to find it absolutely packed out (and the ushers weren't being a lot of help - I don't know if they could have been)... we ended up finding some places to sit up in the nosebleed section (I didn't actually get a nosebleed. Oh, wait, I did. But that was at lunch and had nothing to do with the altitude).

It then took a while to get into what was going on, as worship had already begun, and the hosts were a little wacky and I'm not much on arena events anyway, but when Andy Stanley took the stage, all of the logistical problems went out the door.

A Comedy of Errors

... but it all worked out ok.

It all started with a phone call on Sunday - between soccer games. Apparently the musical entertainment for the preschool Mothers' Day party (which is a pretty big deal) canceled. They had a good reason, having to do with a death in their director's family.

But it left the preschool director in a jam: now they didn't have entertainment for the party, and it was already Sunday night (and the party was on Tuesday at noon).

So they wondered: would Tara and I be available?

In case you're a new reader of my blog and/or don't know us very well, Tara is a very good violinist and I play guitar. Maybe we could play something?

So we said we would.

Fast forward (not very far) to Tuesday, when the preschool director was sick and couldn't come.

Tara prepared some pretty well-known children's songs and found chords for them and we decided that I would play and she would sing.

And we would do some bluegrass.

And she would play a song that she had originally prepared to play for Jonathan's class when they were having their "music" week (that particular class day was canceled because of the weather).

And I would do the welcome, greeting, public speaking part.

It all worked really well, and (at least as far as I could tell) everyone had fun.

Except that Jonathan was mad that the other kids didn't really know how a certain song (one of his favorites) went. (That favorite is Down By the Bay. Some of his other favorites are Can-Can and Beethoven's Fifth).

Preschool Harvest Party

I'm not going to write much about Jonathan's class and their Harvest Party, but I wanted to post a couple of pictures.

The kids had a blast, of course. There were several games and all three classes rotated through them. Jonathan's favorite was the fishing game.

Jonathan mostly loved running around with his friend, Christopher. They were quite the pair, the policeman and the fireman... When they had a relay race, instead of running individually, Jonathan and Christopher ran together.

Andrew wants so much to be a big boy, and he made himself right at home with all the big kids.

Tara was "roped into" being the room mother and planning and executing the party, and did an excellent job, but it was exhausting! I came down and helped her, mostly doing "crowd control" of the eight little whirlwinds (plus our extra little bumble bee, who was buzzing around everywhere). There's a reason I didn't end up running the family preschool...

Preschool Open House

This fall, Jonathan is starting preschool at the Little Blessings Preschool, an outreach of the Millersport United Methodist Church (where I'm pastor). Last week I had parent orientation, and this Monday was Open House.

Jonathan immediately began playing with the toys - or should I say working with the toys. He is extremely interested in toys he can work with and has a long attention span for them.

I think he played with two items the whole 45 minutes we were there.

He even played with another boy from his class.

Andrew, on the other hand, was all over the place. He loved the toys in Jonathan's class. So much that he sometimes even took the toys he wanted right out of the big kids' hands. He's going to be disappointed that he doesn't get to go yet!