Circuit Meeting, Day 1

I arrived in Emporia Monday around dinner time. We went out to a Carolina BBQ place - all you can eat buffet style. They did have a lot of food - and lots of it fried! I tried a little bit of a lot of different things. The fried chicken was good, as were the fried flounder and hush puppies, but I was not brave enough to try to fried chicken gizzards! :-) Dessert-wise, the apple and peach cobblers were quite good, while the banana pudding was absolutely terrible! Completely tasteless. After dinner we hung out a while and talked, but I turned in kind of early - a long day.

Tuesday was the second half of our LERT training - Lutheran Early Response Team. This is to qualify us to help in times of disaster and to help us get the folks in our congregation ready to help as well. So after this day, we got our picture taken and will be receiving badges that will enable us to have access to our local Emergency Operations Centers and they know we won't be untrained but well-meaning volunteers that will just get in the way, but folks who know what they're doing. We're not first responders - they come in right away. We can come in the second wave to help with recovery and spiritual care.

After that I began my presentation on prayer. I am thinking about this as I will be teaching a sectional at Higher Things on prayer this summer. So we discussed things for about 75 minutes in the afternoon, and today we'll go through some Scriptures and think a bit more - maybe, hopefully, in ways that open some eyes and thinking. We had Private Absolution and the Divine Service last night and then some "fellowship" (let the reader understand) afterward.

All in all, not a bad conference thus far. Good, as always, to see the brothers again. The Holiday Inn we are staying at is nice. For breakfast yesterday, however, the scrambled eggs were the worst I have ever tasted! They tasted like fish! I am usually pretty tolerant and can eat most things, but I took one bite of those and couldn't eat any more. Just horrible. The cinnamon rolls, though, awesome!

Home tonight.