Leadership Encounter 2018

Last year, our church hosted a really wonderful training/team-building weekend for small group leaders. It was the first time our church had launched an official small group ministry, so they wanted to equip the leaders well. Ryan and I attended, loved it, and learned so much.

A few months ago, one of the pastors at our church met me for coffee and told me the church planned to host this conference again, but this time they were expanding it to include leadership in general. Not just small group leaders, but Sunday School teachers, board members, and other leaders. She also asked if Ryan and I would serve as the keynote speakers for the event. (I about dropped my latte straight on the floor.)

So for the last many weeks, we've been praying, preparing, writing, creating props, practicing, and doing everything we knew to do to make sure we gave our very best to this conference. We were honored and excited to have the opportunity to share, but we were also appropriately terrified, speaking in front of people we're still just meeting for the first time. (We're still relatively new to the church.)

So! Wanna see some peeks at the weekend?

The church made this really lovely booklet with bios of all the speakers, outlines, and pages for notetaking. Here was our bio page:

Our church is really big (both in square footage and in number of people) so the event was held in the student sanctuary. (This was the main sanctuary of the church before they expanded the building a few years ago and moved into a much larger room.) The decorating committee did a great job making the room so very welcoming!

It took us two vehicles to get there, because we had a huge prop for the stage:

After we got everything set up, we used our spare time to go over our talk again and pray over the room. And drink lattes. We are better speakers when we have lattes.

We did clean up, though. I promise. :)

The evening began with some icebreaker games. (Games generally terrify me, and even I had fun, so they were good ones!) Then they served dinner and gathered everyone together for a time of worship.

The majority of our speaking time together was Friday evening. We think it went well. (It's always a challenge to imagine how you did, and we certainly do not want to toot our own horns. But no one threw anything at us, so that's a good sign, right?

One of the bonuses of this speaking event was the chance to stay in our own home! We weren't there too long...got home late and got up extra early to go back, but it was nice to be in our own bed!

We had to be back early, early, early Saturday morning to continue building our big stage prop:

They provided breakfast for everyone to start the day, and then Ryan and I spoke again briefly to wrap up our illustrations from the night before:

After we spoke, we had the privilege of sitting under the teaching of others in the church, which was a blessing for us! (We took lots of notes!)

Right before lunch, Ryan and I also spoke in breakout sessions. Ryan and his new friend, Sean, spoke to the men. I wasn't in their session to capture it for posterity, but I did get this picture of the two of them after the conference ended. Ryan really enjoyed meeting Sean and working together with him on that session!

My co-speaker for that session was my new friend, Joyce, who became a fast and dear friend as we prepped for this time.

(Ahhhhh, youth room couches.)

Here's a photo of Joyce speaking, and then if you're bored, you're welcome to play "caption this" on my pictures. WHY AM I SO AWKWARD?????

Here you go!

Number One:

 Number Two:

 Number Three:

 Number Four:

 Number Five:

 Number Six:

 Number Seven:

We all ate lunch together, learned in a few final sessions, and that concluded the conference! We are so thankful for God's grace and strength this weekend. It was our joy to serve together!

The Shaffers Shuffle In

What a weekend! Ryan and I have been praying, planning, and preparing for weeks for this weekend, so today we're shuffling your way...on our way to Mo for some rest! :)

* Last Sunday (which now seems like a million years ago) we had a visiting pastor at our church. He is actually a minister at a church down in Ecuador...a sister church to ours. He and his translator did a fantastic job with the morning service! Ryan stayed home that afternoon to watch the Colts, and I went to a baby shower for one of the ladies in our church. It was a very nice shower, and of course, you already saw how it produced my Penelope-from-SNL imitation.

* Ryan was so excited on Monday, because he reached the two million step mark for one of his work challenges. I didn't make it to the end of that challenge. (In the time frame required.) I did well, but not two million well. I did, however, make it through three hours in the salon chair, getting a whole new look for myself! Out with the unhealthy, overbleached hair and in with the highlights again. Happy happy girl!

* Tuesday morning was a beautifully foggy morning that produced a pretty sunrise! I spent the day watching 9/11 documentaries, because that's what I do every year on that day. I never want to forget that the people who lost their lives that day were people with stories. I never tire of hearing them, because it reminds me why our stories matter so much. That night, after he got home from work, Ryan spent the evening in the garage, building the mock-up of our massive stage prop for speaking this weekend. His vision was so much more creative than mine. I was so proud of him!

* I already told you about Wednesday, but that was the day Ryan woke me up early to take me to Dan's donuts for a date! :) Loved that so much! I spent the day working on our event for the weekend, which included sorting freshly-washed stones. AND! I made my own bagels. Delicious.

* Thursday I was able to pick up the booklet the church made for our event...so strange to see the two of us listed as co-speakers. I loved it, though! I made shrimp fried rice for dinner (okay, cauliflower rice) and after we ate, we took a quick walk through the neighborhood. It has been so pretty lately, but the mosquitoes are absolutely no joke, preventing us from walking. I'm such a mosquito buffet.

* Friday was event day! It actually took us TWO vehicles to get to the church with all our props and notes and outfit changes and such. LOL! The place was decorated so very beautifully, and we were able to present the main portion of our message that night. It seemed to go well, and we were welcomed warmly, so we were thankful!

* We were up bright and early yesterday morning to go back to church and prepare for the next portion of the conference. We spoke together (briefly) again and also spoke separately with other friends. We are so grateful we were able to be part of this event together. (We also learned so much from the other speakers of the weekend!)

The Saturday Six

One.

I'm just going to leave this right here. I know some of you will throw things at me, but it's really just a reminder for me that I have a tiny bit more than a month before I move my office back to the living room for a few weeks!

Two.

In the same week Ryan and I moved to Kokomo, one of the Sheriff's deputies in this county was fatally shot while serving a warrant. He was married and had a baby at home...the whole thing was just a heartbreaking story. I found this news clip this week: that baby started preschool this week and several officers showed up to support him on that first day since his dad wasn't able to be there. Ryan's brother is one of the officers in the photo.

Three.

I don't know why I never think to decorate with pillow covers. Like this blogger says, it's so much easier to store interchangeable covers than to store entire pillows. Her post gives multiple links for fun fall pillows in case you're looking for some options to help decorate this fall!

Four.

I found this diffuser blend this week and tried it. Loved it! The house smelled amazing and fallish without being all hello, cinnamon!

Five.

Remember when I told you about our pre-dawn donut date? Looks like Dan's got a little love on the "Only in Your State" site this week too! (We did not stand in a line like that one!)

Six.

This week I'll leave you with a link to an article I wrote for Annesley...a little trip down memory lane!

Friday Randoms

Happy Friday, everyone! We're keeping it random here in Shafferland today for reasons you'll soon understand!

* I've been praying for my east coast friends in the path of the hurricane. You all know I'm not a fan of storms, so I definitely feel for you, even though I've never personally experienced a hurricane. (This week I overheard a conversation in which one lady kept calling it a hyurricane, so I confess I've started calling it a hyurricane too. I don't know why. Any of you call it a hyurricane? Is that a dialect thing?) Anyway. I'm praying for you and have found this to be my favorite hurricane/hyurricane meme so far:

* And speaking of prayer...we're not too proud to ask for some! Ryan and I are speaking at a conference this weekend. We have been working hard on this for many weeks, and we know we have done all we can do and at this point, it's just up to the Lord to give us grace for each moment as needed. We're trusting and resting in that.

BUT.

Satan really is a stinker, you know that? I fully expected some sabotage, because it always happens. And it started about a month ago and has only intensified since then. I will admit the specific scenarios are beyond anything I ever would have imagined, and I have a pretty good imagination! I fully believe that the harder he tries to trip us up, the greater the possibility for God to do something crazy amazing and beyond our wildest dreams. So I guess in that respect, all the sabotage is pretty exciting, because it means God must have something REALLY good. But we are human, after all, and it gets overwhelming and distracting to have so many diversions going on all around us.

So if we come to mind this weekend, would you help support us in prayer? Like I said, we are as prepared as we can be, so we are trusting God to carry the rest. Our big prayers (other than not publicly humiliating ourselves by falling off the platform or something like that) are that we will be able to fully focus and be 100% present in our work and that God will be completely honored with our words and do the work needed among the people attending.

* I tried a new recipe this week (Dashing Dish, of course) and was blown away by how good it was. I will confess to you I did not have high hopes. A clean eating bagel? I mean, there are some things that just don't work all cleaned up. But I was wrong. It was 100% delicious. Ryan agreed, which is the ultimate test.

* I am not gifted at impressions, nor have I ever watched Saturday Night Live. However. Several years ago, someone told me I had to watch the clips of Penelope, and I laughed until I cried. And I also became a fairly decent Penelope impressionist.

Sunday afternoon I attended a baby shower, and someone posted this picture (shown only in part below) to Facebook. I took one look at it and whaddya know? I'm Penelope even when I'm not trying!

Source

Well, my friends, I guess that's it for me today. Thanks for visiting here even when I'm all over the place! Hope your weekend is spectacular, and stop blessing those rains down in Africa!

Love in the Little Things

Right after I turned forty, we seriously cranked up our attention to our diet and exercise. Yes. Forty was a wake-up call. I didn't want to keep slowly regaining what I had worked so hard to lose a couple of years ago. 

So we made changes. We went full force back into clean eating, ramped up the exercising again, and I also made some additional changes to my eating habits. Among other things, I eliminated my morning and evening snack. 

I don't think you can possibly understand how much I loved my evening snack. Ryan and I ate a little mug of cereal every single night. In our defense, we ate pricey, healthy cereal with the best milk we can afford. If we were going to eat, we were going to try to make it the best version of a possibly questionable decision. I looked forward to my evening cereal with all that is in me, and that is not an exaggeration. I also just loved this little tradition we had. For me it was as much about the experience of sharing a snack with Ryan as the food itself.

And then I had to kick it to the curb. I missed it. I still miss it. When I watched all the tutorial videos about the new eating plan, the lady told me that after a while I would be so satisfied by vegetables at dinner, I wouldn't be hungry for my evening snack. (She'd clearly never met me.) She also told me crunchy vegetables are every bit as rewarding as chips. I eat the vegetables instead of the chips now, but I'll go on record as saying I miss my chips with my whole heart.

So we've been going at these new habits for almost exactly four months now, and in that time, I've lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-13 pounds. I have more to lose, but I've learned to be content to not lose it all this week and actually enjoy my days as it comes off in a slower, steadier pattern.

Despite the great progress and the fact that my clothes aren't cutting off my air passage anymore, I miss all my beloved foods that I gave up and cut back. 

And literally every single night, when we go to bed, I look at the clock and tell Ryan how long we have until Dan's opens.

Dan's, you say?

Yes, Dan's. The official name is Dan's Variety Bakery. It's a little local donut shop that everyone calls Dirty Dan's. It opens at 1:00 in the morning and is usually sold out by the time the work crowd reports for duty. It's pretty popular with the teen crowd, since the only other things in this city open at that hour are Steak n Shake and the emergency room. (IWU students even drive over from Marion to get Dan's donuts in the middle of the night.)

So every night, we'll go to bed and I'll say something like "Two hours until Dan's opens." And then I try to ignore my rumbling tummy and just fall asleep so I can wake up and have breakfast. (Not a Dan's breakfast. A yogurt/granola/berries breakfast.)

Two nights ago, we went to bed and I announced the time until Dan's opens. I curled up and sailed off to dreamland. At 5:00, Ryan shook me awake and said, "Hey. Wanna go to Dan's?"

WHAT?!!! Is it Christmas?????

I told him we didn't have to. I knew it was cutting short his night of sleep and he had a long day of work ahead. But he got up and ready, so I jumped out of bed to go with him. 

I looked horrible. Bedhead is so much more attractive on the Hallmark movie girls than it is on me. 

But we crawled in the car and drove to Dan's. 

They had already sold out of some things, but they had plenty of options for us. We nodded at the gentleman sitting in the corner drinking coffee and made our selections. 

Even sneaked a couple of donut holes on the way home. 

You know what I loved about this? It wasn't about the donuts, although let's just pause for a moment to observe the joy of Dan's Donuts in the pre-dawn hours. 

(Moment.)

I loved it that Ryan has supported and encouraged me every single step of the way these last four months of hard work. I love it that he's eaten a billion meals that were way healthier than he probably needed, but he wanted to eat what I'm eating. I love it that he's worked out with me just to hold me accountable. I love it that he's given me permission to have treats now and then so I don't give up and fail entirely. 

And I love it that he set his alarm for the middle of the night to surprise me with a Dan's date. It was about being seen and loved way more than a chocolate frosted custard donut.

(Go big or go home, people.)

Thank you, Ryan, for loving me with the little things - like Dan's donuts at five in the morning.

And if you want to go back right now and get more...they're open again....just sayin'. 

:) 

Reviving Rest

I'm participating in a Bible study this fall...a new group for me. It's something I chose to do to be able to meet together with other women and be purposeful about my study time. During our first meeting, we received our shiny new books and our first assignment to complete before our next study.

When I saw the words in print, outlining the first assignment, it was all I could do to keep from jumping up and down. In fact, when I stopped by Ryan's work on the way home, I did jump up and down telling him about it.

The assignment was to go to bed at a decent hour one night and sleep until my body woke up naturally.

What?

A night with no alarms to interrupt? Sleeping until noon if I so desired? Had Christmas morning just come to Bible study?

I felt just the tiniest bit guilty about the whole thing, because I knew there were probably some women in the study who genuinely couldn't complete the assignment because of jobs or kids that wouldn't permit a true, uninterrupted sleep-in. And then I felt the tiniest bit joyful that for this season of my life, I could find a day for such a luxury.

It ended up happening Friday night and Saturday morning. I canceled all our plans for Friday night (except dinner, of course, because I'm not completely crazy!) and we simply rested on the couch, watching TV and talking. I didn't even multi-task my resting. I just rested.

We went to bed and I double/triple checked my alarm to make sure it was turned off.

I slept...and slept...and slept...and slept...

until:

(If that photo looks blurry...well, it is. I wasn't awake yet.)

So apparently I can no longer sleep until noon, but this beautiful wakeup time gave me nine hours and four minutes of sleep, probably a record for me since my gallcation a few years ago.

It was such a glorious morning. Ryan treated me to breakfast-in-couch, unending cups of coffee, and more rest.

It set the whole tone for the day, really. It was the day that hadn't gone as we planned. We weren't able to go to the football game and it rained like crazy, but we were able to spend time with my mom on her birthday, and we were able to be our nephew's first babysitters that night.

A day of true rest is a gift, and it's one we don't give ourselves very often, I'm afraid.

My Bible study book asked me to detail what I learned about faith from this time of intentional rest. I wrote that sometimes living out my faith is hard work, but sometimes merely having faith in Christ means I can live with a peace and a rest that revives me.

I'm grateful for the rest for my body and my soul. Both were sorely needed.

By the way...I peeked at next week's assignment already. Social media fast. I have done no jumping about that one.

Babysitting the Baby

I can't let today go by without pausing to acknowledge September 11th and what it means for this country and for each of us who remember that day in 2001. I usually spend this day watching documentaries and remembering, and as much as my work will allow, I will probably continue that tradition today.

It feels a bit strange to podcast and blog about something else on a day marked with such meaning, but I also know that some people need a diversion, so I will share both a new podcast and a new post today. If you need this day for memories, feel free to come back tomorrow for stories. I do understand.

But for those of you who need some podcast company, here is a brand new (ON TIME!!!) Spill the Beans for you!

Listen here

Funny side note for you...a few days ago on a buy/sell/trade site, I found an ad for someone looking for a "babbysitter." It so cracked me up that I began using that word as the actual word, and now it's hard for me to revert to plain old babysitter.

This past weekend, we took our own turn with babbysitting, and it was FUN! I learned that Ryan's sister did not know I used to do this "for a living" for my junior high/high school/college years, but I sure did! 

Ryan's sister and her husband had a high school class reunion to attend Saturday night, so they asked if we could watch the newest little member of our family! It was kind of a big deal for them, because it was the first time she'd been away from him for any length of time. (I thought she did an amazing job, by the way. She didn't cry when she walked out and she'd been gone quite a while before she checked in!) Meanwhile, back at the babbysitting homestead, I was a documenting fool.

He was zonked out when he arrived, so I just let him sleep in his carrier for a while. When he started to stir, I zipped over and got him right out, because hello! Cute snuggly baby in the house! I wanna hold him! He needed to stretch, so I gave him some stretching/waking up space. Doesn't that double chin just slay you? 

First up on his agenda? FEED ME!!! (Reminds me so much of myself.) Ryan and I did some quick teamwork to fix dinner.

No issues with his appetite. He drank every drop. Wore him out.

For the record, he's also a champion burper, which meant an outfit change for me!

Ryan took over for wardrobe change and for the warming up of the grown-ups' dinners. (AKA the babbysitters' dinners.)

I did diaper duty the whole night, and there were no mishaps, thankyouverymuch. 

I found an 8 hour hymns lullaby on YouTube and rocked him back to sleep. 

A few more snuggles...

Another bottle and a switcharoo into jam jams...and right back to sleep.

It was a great night, and I felt these two babbysitters made a dynamic team! :) 

Birthday Lunch with the Birthday Girl!

This past Saturday, we were supposed to be at the Purdue football game with our friend, Pat, but that did not end up happening. (Womp, womp.) It was cold, rainy, and just nasty. Nasty. Ryan and I speak this weekend and could not, not, not risk getting sick, so we had to back out of it. Sadness.

BUT! That meant we could spend time with my mom on her birthday, which was good and fun! She and Dad had plans to eat lunch at Cracker Barrel, so we met them there. Actually, we got there first, and got a table. I told the waitress we were waiting on two more and one of them was a birthday girl. When Mom and Dad showed up, the waitress said to them, "Oh, I didn't realize it was you!"

Of course. Of course my parents are on a first name basis with the Cracker Barrel waitstaff. Why didn't I think of that and name drop?

Probably because I was enjoying this:

Hey. Don't judge. (Or do...it won't make me cry.) It was a cold, wet, nasty, rainy day, and this was a bright spot.

The birthday girl and her date...she makes 82 look pretty good, doesn't she?

Oh! Speaking of the birthday girl! My aunt posted this picture to Facebook and I remembered an awfully similar look of mine from my years of yore. Ummmm…..gene pool much in this family?

(Clearly I needed a one-way ticket to finishing school. Hello, undies.)

Anyway. Back to lunch. (Where I sat like a lady.) My obligatory meal selfie with Ryan:

(That's not food on my chin. Random dot from light glare.)

Mom asked the waitress (because they're first name besties, you know) to take a group picture:

Because it was her birthday, Mom got a free dessert. Though normally I wouldn't dream of recommending anything other than a chocolate ANYTHING, have you seen Cracker Barrel's apple dumplings? Furthermore, have you tasted Cracker Barrel's apple dumplings? Not all apple dumplings are created equal, my friend. (Don't ask me how I know.) But ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this one is worth it. And because Mom is a much nicer person than I am, she shared with all of us.

Apparently it wasn't enough, though, because...

The gene pool runs deep, people. Deep.

(We did get a proper picture, though.)

And then back into the rain we went.

Happy birthday (again) Mom!