Staff retreat ... with pictures!

I had written basically what I wanted to say for my latest prayer letter, and then waited on Ray to share the pictures he took over the staff retreat, because of course prayer letters are always better with a picture or two.

Well, when I browsed through them, several of them pointed so tellingly to important moments in our conferences, that I thought, "Hey, I know! Instead of a pdf, I'll make a slide show! That will be cool!"

So I did, and then realized it was way too big for a lot of my recipients to possibly receive or open. Quite frustrating, but I figure I can give you a modified version of it here. Hope you enjoy:

We had traveled from every direction – Ray from California, Ken from Minnesota, Sam from Kentucky, several from the northeast, and of course me from Texas. One volunteer went from Asia to Canada to Charlotte in three days to attend!

Christie left her family in Nigeria to be with us for these meetings. Over the weekend, she learned her little Josiah, not even 2 years old, had contracted malaria.
We thank God that he recovered quickly.

We did some puzzling over where God is taking us, and how he's taking us there ...

and took an honest look at our failures ...

Prayed through some serious frustrations ...

And through that process, God helped us see what we can do better. Here Ray, George, and I are working on a timeline by which we hope to finish BHLM, and two other major projects, by 2015.

I love this picture, because you can see how much joy we have working together in the Lord!

We also made a timeline to be serving 100 schools in Nigeria and Cameroon by this time next year. Here I'm checking the system Christie will be using to make sure it has all the required resources on it. Each flash drive has the whole operating system, courses and resource materials on it.

We changed our structure to put some of our people more in their giftedness...

We restructured our programs a bit to make them more customizable to people's needs.
This brings to high priority some of the courses we've had waiting "on the back burner."

We also piloted a storytelling workshop, by which we want to extend our teaching ministry to the church in North America.

My favorite part is always the fellowship:

Even at the airport, we're still happily at work!