It's not about the chocolate

Several days after my breakfast with Rich, Pastor Scott gathered all of the full time ministry staff together for an all day meeting. We spent a significant amount of our meeting in prayer and sharing what God had been doing in our lives personally and in our ministry. While God's promised that "where two or three are gathered, there I am with them" with our staff, where two or three are gathered, there's sure to be a wild and fun time. Add to that being holed up in a room all day and it's like the time I doused the charcoal with so much lighter fluid the lid to the grill caught fire. Though you may not believe it, we did have a very focused and productive day.

It was neat to see each of us participate and contribute to the discussion. And while our backgrounds are quite diverse, we span a range of ages and our approach to ministry sometimes differ, we were uniquely unified throughout the meeting. It was an exercise I thoroughly enjoyed.

As I write this, eight months later, it's been fun to recollect to that first meeting and especially to look at our original worksheets.
You can see how much we left on the cutting room floor because we felt it was implied, in an effort to keep the statement short and memorable. Actually, we figuratively left the floor covered with ideas and worksheets throughout this process - either the Elmer's was defective or only the good ideas were sticking.

With prayer interspersed in the interim, we reconvened several times after that initial meeting to see if we were comfortable with our work and the direction we were headed. Pastor Scott then shared it with the staff for comment and reaction and then the Elders. Having received very constructive feedback, but limited negative reaction, we started preparing for the February message series.

The irony of that first meeting is that it wasn't until I started composing this post that I realized that in addition to the bottled water, soda and pretzels that we were munching on during the all day meeting, there were also M&M's on the table. None of us realized it at the time that M&M's would come to the forefront several months later.