Lunch at PF Changs

Yesterday's lunch with our Bible Study was so great we decided to do lunch together again today after the last Session of the Conference.  We had all received gift vouchers to "PF Chang's" which has a very good name for itself.  Needless to say, we had a wonderful time there and the food was amazing!

Becoming Your Husband's Friend, Fan and Flame

Today I went to the Placerita Baptist Church Marriage seminar for women along with my friend Elna. It was such a great time of fellowship and learning! The church was beautifully decorated, and the speakers and their topics were excellent! Here are some of the highlights of the day!

Volunteering for Shepherd's Conference

I am so excited to be here at Grace Community Church for my first Shepherd's Conference!  Andrew is the guy in charge of the whole Bookstore this year and will be really busy, so I have decided to volunteer to help at the conference too.  I will be involved in the shepherds shoppe where they sell all the merchandise for the conference.  It looks like I will be receiving some training before the conference so I can be an overseer of the store, helping to fix any problems that come up...  Today was the volunteer's meeting after the service, and there were over 600 people there, all ready and eager to serve the 3500 pastors and men who will come from all over the world to be encouraged and refreshed for ministry!  The volunteers are all assigned to different areas and will be working together to make the conference as effective and smooth as possible.  I am so blessed to be a part of this church!

 

Andrew and I can't wait to see a few of the South Africans who will be coming out to the conference, it will be such a sweet time of fellowship and ministry!

Shepherd's Conference Website

The Shepherd's Conference is from March 3-7 2010.

"Our mission is to provide the opportunity for men in church leadership to be challenged in their commitment to biblical ministry and to find encouragement as together we seek to become more effective servants of our Chief Shepherd."

The Women's Fall Event 2009: Spread the Glory

Today, 900 women gathered to enjoy an afternoon hearing from our keynote speaker, Chelsea Cameron at Grace Community Church. What a gifted speaker and godly woman Chelsea is! When I arrived I found an abundance of lovely South African ladies to sit with, and we got seats in the third row for the seminars!

Women Discipling Women Conference 2009

Women Discipling Women Conference is an annual conference hosted by the 'Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling' Program at Grace Community Church. It is designed to equip the church with women who are competent to address the needs of other women and children with authoritative answers from the Word of God, enabling interpersonal discipling relationships in them. The keynote speakers were Elyse Fitzpatrick, Martha Peace and Dr. Laura Hendrickson.

I thoroughly enjoyed this conference and now have my eyes set on the program at the Master's Conference! Here are some great snapshots of the day...

The final session was a powerful call by Elyse Fitzpatrick to find our entire being, purpose, power, and LIFE “IN Christ”. This image was repeated in our minds over and over again as she drilled into our hearts the truths of the gospel that are so easily mis-communicated and poorly understood in the daily Christian life.

And right at the end, the Coordinator for the Conference was proposed to on stage by her boyfriend! Over 2000 women left the conference with tears in their eyes! Wonderful end to a wonderful conference!

Celebrating One Year of Friendship, and 2 Months of being in the USA!

The 15th of June marks exactly a year since we met in Palm Springs. We were introduced by a mutual friend, Kerry, at the 2008 conference and our eyes met that day for the first time! It just so happened that Resolved this year fell on the exact same weekend so we got to celebrate this anniversary in the same place that it all went down in! After the morning sessions we jumped in the car and headed off to the Aerial Tramway that takes you up the mountain against which Palm Springs is nestled.

We arrived and bought our tickets for the cable cars and watched ours dock at the station ready to take us up, up and away! We had no idea what to expect up there, but we had had some suggestions to take a jacket with...

When we arrived at the top after an exciting ride in the rotating tram we landed on what seemed to be on another part of the world because it was so different to the desert-like, flat terrain of Palm springs. The view of the surrounding area was absolutely breathtaking and you could see for miles and miles!
After a bit of exploring, we headed indoors where it was warmer to get some lunch. On our way there we met a tame squirrel who was quite happy to be stroked. This was a great treat for me because we don't get to see squirrels like this back home in Durban... Such delightfully bushy tails and cute little ears... I believe they are seen as a real pest here in California.

We spent the afternoon just chatting and wondering the peak of the mountain but had to head back in time for the evening session of resolved so we begun our descent to the warmer plains down below!


Before we headed back to the conference centre we went to see the giant wind turbines that litter the hills around the area, also something I'm not used to seeing, and enjoyed the arid landscape that is so typical of southern California (I've been told to use the term SoCal - it's what the locals have nicknamed it!)

A random boat in the middle of nowhere! For the video of the parable of the "Pearl of great price" which was filmed here in Palm Springs for last year's Resolved Conference, click on this link - it's very cool:

http://www.resolved.org/Video.aspx?height=410&width=640&titlevar=TheParable&videosource=

We had such a great time of reflection over the last year of being the closest of friends and the wonderful journey that our 2 months of living in the USA has been. Thanks for sharing it with us!