ACSD

This weekend I went to an ACSD (Association for Christians in Student Development) conference at Malone College in Canton, Ohio. It is a conference for the Residence Life staff from our area conference, so we took the RA staff along with us.

It was a short conference - just Friday evening and Saturday morning. We ended up spending almost as much time in the vans as we did at the conference! Some of the staff was a bit grumpy about that, but we explained how the folks at Malone come here 99% of the time, so it was only fair that we did the time once in a while to be at their location. I think they got it, but still weren't happy about it.

Friday night we arrived and had a nice meal in their student center. After that we headed across campus to a chapel for the "main session." We spent about 30 minutes in worship - real heartfelt worship! I was impressed by the students on their worship team. The main speaker was pretty good, but he spoke longer than I wanted to sit in a seat after the 5 1/2 hour drive to Ohio. We left the students on campus to stay overnight with their peers and us RDs drove to the hotel. We hung out in Alex & Chad's room talking about work stuff until almost 1 a.m. I think we may have ended up staying up later than some of the students!

Saturday morning we had another great worship time as a large group followed by the main speaker sharing for a while again. Then we broke up and went to various workshops.

I went to one on sabbath. The woman spoke about God's design for us to have rest each day and a sabbath once a week. She shared some scriptures from the OT and we watched a nooma video. I thought the information was good, but nothing earth shatteringly new for me. I did pick up several handouts that I think might be thought provoking when I get around to reading them.

My second workshop was on community. It was good content, but mostly reinforced my own beliefs about the value of community in the Christian church. The speaker was interesting and actually knows the president of Goshen. So, it was good to make a GC connection with him.

At the closing luncheon we have a t shirt give away. Unfortunately the person who was bringing the GC shirts (NOT me!) waited until the last minute to look for them and since they weren't where he thought we didn't have any to share. I felt bad about that and even worse when 10 of our 15 students ended up winning shirts in the give away! Next year we will just need to take twice as many as normal to make up for this year.

The trip back was pretty uneventful (thankfully) and we were all glad to be out of the vans when we arrived back in Goshen.