These two weeks back in Spain have flown by very fast. The first week was full of coaching appointments and online planning meetings for an upcoming youth leaders' forum. Then a respiratory infection struck and I've spent the past week indoors, fighting off a bad bout of bronchitis and tracheitis. The antibiotics finally seem to be doing their job, and I'm starting to feel a bit better now, but I have to confess I still feel a bit weak at the prospect of my long journey to Belarus tomorrow. (Click on the picture to enlarge the map.) I'll leave home fairly early in the morning, but will only arrive in Minsk at 1 am on Monday morning Fortunately, some KKI friends in Minsk will meet me at the airport and take me to their home for the rest of the night, before we move on to our conference accommodation the next day.
Conference probably isn't the right word, as this year is our smaller KKI regional gathering. For the first few days there will be just half a dozen of us - the KKI European leadership team. Then we'll be joined on Thursday by 35 others - the national leaders of KKI ministries in all the different countries of Europe. We'll be together for three days of prayer, fellowship, and seeking the Lord together. We'll also run some training tracks to equip those men and women for their national leadership task.
I'll be teaching two of the training tracks - one on leadership mentoring and the other on youth mentoring - as well as facilitating some of the plenary sessions.
When the week is up, I'll fly back to Spain again, with an even more complicated itinerary than on the outbound trip. I need to be at Minsk airport at 3 am, and will take three flights, criss-crossing Northern Europe before arriving back in Malaga. Thanks for your prayers.
I'm back in Spain, after two weeks in the chill of Northern Europe. We even had snow one weekend while I was in Sweden, as you can perhaps see in these twilight photos taken as the snow was beginning to melt.
The writers' workshop was interesting and I enjoyed it a lot, even though it was quite a busy schedule with lots of homework to be done every night. The first week's topic was about creative non-fiction; that's when you take a true story and write it in an interesting way, like you'd read in a book, rather than in a simple journalistic style. Our homework assignment was to interview a class mate and then write their story, just like writing a chapter in a book.
The second week's topic was about thematic writing - like when someone writes a book to communicate teaching or ideas, rather than to tell a story. Our homework that week included the writing of an article. My topic was to consider the question of whether missionaries should urge native tribespeople to wear clothing!
Our class was a fun group of people. Four of us were there only for the seminar weeks and the remaining dozen will be completing the course and writing their books over the coming six months.
