Staff Conference

The hotel in Drienice, Slovakia, where we had the annual IM staff conference

With my mentor, Grace(the wife of the Pres. of IM Canada), and Darlis(wife of Pres. of IM US)

The two Anna Merediths

With my new Polish friends: Edyta, Daria and Monika

With Jenn Nagy, serving in Warsaw, Poland

Staff Conference was this past weekend, Friday through Sunday, and was just great. I so enjoyed the fellowship, worship, and the two main speakers. It was exhausting, but a really great time of seeing friends and getting to know a lot of the other missionaries. I spent most of my free time getting to know the other young missionaries, the teams they work with and the teams that our national interns came from. One of my goals was to eat with different people at every meal, so as to get to know as many people as possible. So from last Wednesday(when we arrived to set up) through Monday morning(when we left), I spent my meals with around 75 different people, which is almost half of the people attending the conference(175). I really enjoyed getting to hear about so many different ministries that are going on all over Eastern Europe and it was great to make many valuable connections.

I also really enjoyed the times of worship. With 175 voices truly worshiping together in a small room, it's a powerful sound and wonderful experience. The team that organized it had set it up so that I played with a guitarist three of the sessions, a local worship team played another, and a Slovak bluegrass band played for Sunday morning. In the afternoon the bluegrass group invited me to play with them during our break. I never in my life thought that I would be able to say that I had spent an hour and a half playing with a Slovak bluegrass band. It was so much fun playing with them and hearing them sing old, traditional songs in both English and Slovakian. I left very tired, but feeling very refreshed spiritually and am so grateful that IM does this annual conference for all of us!