b-rad's travels

Back from Anaheim and now sitting in a hotel room in Portland, because I have seminary in the morning. The rest of the conference was awesome. Since I wrote last we heard from Shane Claiborne who works with homeless in PHiladelphia and Philip Yancey spoke on prayer. What a great time of encouragement and training. I guess the 3 things that I would take out of the weekend are
Creativity: Just being creative in how I teach, and really put in a lot of effort to teach effectively
The One: Being willing to go after the one and risk the 99, which is the idea that we focus on people and not programs. The program is a means of reaching the people but not the total goal. Hence me starting small groups for the underclassman guys. It'll be a great way to connect with the students outside of sun. nights
Rest and Reflection: I need to make sure that everything I do is prayed over, and really following where God wants the youth group to go. I also need to make sure I take my personal time with God, and on my own. That time is easy to ignore, so I need to make sure I'm doing that.
I've also started to schedule the winter and spring activities. i'm very excited about the the events and message series that we are going to do.
Also looks like our summer mission trips are coming together. Pray for our youth comittee meeting where these get approved. I don't want to say what we're doing in case students find the blog, but it'll be different than what river ridge has done, so I'm hoping everyone buys in to where we are going.

And on a Brad's not very smart note, I am in a holiday inn express and am hungry so thought I would order a pizza. I think I'm dialing Papa John's, and hear the lady at the other end say hoiday inn express, so I think wow she already knows what phone I'm calling from that's cool, and proceed to order a pizza, until she says "Are you a guest" and it clicks how I'm incredibly smart, so yeah good times!