Present Joys

I had the immense privilege of attending the first-ever CROSS conference in Louisville with my bible study this past weekend (friday 27 dec–monday 30 dec). We spent three and a half days listening to rich biblical preaching about the gospel and world mission.

Our days were long: guys and girls stayed with two host families about a half hour away from downtown Louisville. Every morning, we’d wake up and eat our breakfast in the car on our way to pick up the girls. After nearly an hour of driving, we’d arrive at the Kentucky International Convention Center, where we kept busy with plenary conference sessions, breakout sessions, and lunch breaks . I averaged five hours of sleep each night. Oh, but it was so good! Some highlights:

• We all had dinner at the convention center with a meal plan. The food was a pretty lame, so to keep ourselves entertained, we loudly pretended spherical butter pats were cheesecake balls with the hopes of snookering bystanders into eating them. (We were successful!)
• The entire conference was saturated with robust and unapologetic Reformed theology.
• Also thrilling: singing strong, good hymns of praise to God with 4000 other human beings, led by Matt Boswell.
• Ligon Duncan’s breakout session on complementarianism was scintillating and has already prompted several good conversations in our group.
• Conrad Mbewe’s sweater.
• Pastor Kurt, our solitary chaperone, had some difficulty backing out of our host family’s driveway as we were leaving one morning and made humungous divots in his yard. Our host didn’t mind, but we didn’t discover this until two days later, before which there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth on Kurt’s part.
• I got a lot of knitting done! And I helped Karen make serious progress on her first pair of socks.