5/23/2005 04:48:00 PM|||Joel VandenBrink|||

The team

I went down to emergent with a group of students/staff/faculty. The students on the trip were Karen Wunder Tracy, Meredith Dancause, Tom Ryan, and myself. The staff that went was Ronna Miller and Zach Brittle -- and finally the faculty that went was Dwight Friesen and Dan Allender. We were quite an eclectic mix with different passions and different desires for the trip. But we did have at least one thing in common -- we are all fearful of what the trip was going to be like. Now, it wasn't that we were fearful all in the same way, but we all had verbally expressed some sort of fear. Because of this, in part, we 'recruited' five people to pray for us. I want to thank those of you that prayed for me (and us). It is hard to say that I felt your prayers, but I can safely say that your prayers influenced the way my conversations happened and how I interacted with people. So thank you for praying.

We, as a team, had decided that we wanted to be intentional about being a Spiritual team. We not only wanted to go on this together, but we really wanted to be transformed together and individually. We wanted to be there to care for each other as hard things came up and we wanted to be able to celebrate when incredible moments of strength and tenderness happened. In a very real sense, we wanted to be a church (as I define it) for 4.5 days of the trip. We, in my opinion, succeeded at doing this. It was a beautiful experience, and a refreshing experience. We cared for each other, we cried with each other, we laughed with each other. We engaged in tough conversations together and were able to talk about why they were tough -- without getting defensive. We were able to love each other.

Thank you all for being on this trip with me. I enjoyed each one of your presence's and what you had to offer me. You all, individually and collectively, breathed a new sense of hope into me.

May the God of remembrance stay with us

peace
joel

|||111689419614404306|||Emergent Conversation Part 2