Break-out sessions

The Christian Alliance for Orphans Conference was held at Brentwood Baptist Church in Nashville.  It is a huge and beautiful facility that has rooms and rooms and seems to go on forever.  Over the course of the conference there were multiple different “break-out” sessions that participants could attend. Topics ranged from how to start an orphan care ministry in your church, to how to put on a successful missions trip, children aging out of foster care, to global orphan care, and on and on. There were more than 90 different topics and sessions offered.  We attended six different sessions during our time there.

One session was held in a beautiful chapel with Gothic arches and stained glass windows.  It was about starting an orphan care ministry in your church.  At one point, the speaker asked us to partner up with some of the folks sitting in pews near us to discuss several questions that were posted on the large screen at the front of the room.  It was a little awkward at first, but when we turned around in our seats we met a really wonderful gal name Whitney sitting right behind us.  As we talked, we discovered that she lives in Noblesville, Indiana, just a 45 short minutes from where we live in Yorktown!

We had a short visit with Whitney who is trying to get an orphan care ministry started in her church. We tried to find each other on Facebook from our cell phones so that we could stay connected since we live so close.  We wanted to be able to applaud her progress and she was interested in following our journey to Jamaica.  But, there was no cell service in the stone chapel so we vowed to do it later.

As often happens in settings like this, the information that we took home from the conference was voluminous.  We talked to scores of people and picked up stacks of brochures.  The page with Whitney's name and information on it became buried under notes, business cards, books, t-shirts, and stacks of papers.  Sadly, I haven’t seen that page from my notebook again.

We talked about Whitney on our way home from Tennessee to Indiana .  Whitney?  Are you out there somewhere?