C3 and a Big Surprise

This week Fellowship Church hosted C3 at our Grapevine Campus. It was an amazing conference filled with gifted speakers that challenged and inspired. The conference convicted me of many areas of my ministry that need to be changed or refocused. I was so blessed to be on staff because we all got to go for free. But the absolute best part of the conference was that my pastor in Alaska's wife, Laura Rud, was in Texas this week and got the opportunity to attend the conference with me. If you don't know Laura, she is an amazing woman of God who is extremely talented and gifted, and she is also my mentor. It was incredible to experience the conference with her and reflect on my church and ministry at home in Alaska. There have been many times at Fellowship that I've wished I had someone from home to experience certain things with me, this week I had Laura! But the fun didn't stop at the conference for Laura and I. She actually came down to Texas to be there for her sister who had surgery. By God's grace, the surgery went great and her sister was out of the hospital in a matter of days. Laura was able to do a lot more than she had originally expected, so we took full advantage of that. I picked her up (after getting completely lost and getting chased by two bulldogs in a sketchy part of Keller) and took her to dinner on Tuesday. She brought her neice and nephew to our youth service at Fellowship (we were combined Jr. and Sr. High this week) and we all had a blast. Then she got to meet Dori on Thursday for dinner after the conference and she stayed with us Friday night before she flew out this morning. We got to go visit one of her old college buddies who is a youth pastor in McKinney, only after getting yelled at by a toll booth guard (only Laura and I!). It was a packed week, but an amazing week and I'm so blessed to have experienced it all with one of my favorite people :)