My Shortened, Extended Weekend

Hey I used a Juxtapose! I think that's what it's called at least.

Anyway, it's been a strange week for me. I'm used to having 4 day weekends starting Friday-Monday, but the timing has been totally off for this past week. Although I'm supposed to be working Tues-Thurs, I was able to get Thursday off. 5 Day extended weekend right? Well not quite. Actually instead the reason why our whole office got both Thursday and Friday off is so that we can all attend the Leadership Summit.

The summit is actually quite a strange thing. First off it's a 3 day conference ranging from Thursday through to Saturday. So as the title of this blog suggests, it's an extended weekend because I had Thursday off, but it's also shortened because instead I'll be attending the summit until Saturday afternoon. But the strangest part about the event is how it's cleverly engineered for church leaders and business leaders alike. To give an idea of how large this thing really is, the conference itself is held in Chicago to an audience of about 17,000 people. Now on top of that, there are hundreds of satelite sites that broadcast the summit throughout the U.S. and Canada. The satelite location that we're attending is the Ellerslie Road Baptist Church, which in itself probably has about 500 people at that site. So it's a pretty big deal.

But back to what I was talking about. It's very liberating to be able to see this mass of people ranging from numerous denominations of churches and businesses alike, all soaking in the knowledge of today's top leaders. The eagerness to learn and absorb is absolutely amazing at this summit.

Now I'd consider myself somewhat of a leadership summit sophomore, seeing as this is the 2nd year that I've attended. Since the first year's summit totally rocked my world, I came into this year with extremely high expectations. Thankfully, I haven't been disappointed thus far. I think what draws me to this kind of gathering is the fact that it's such a diverse crowd of people all learning on how to lead the world better, and yet there's still a strong central theme about what should be the obligation of everyone living in this planet: helping the poor.

I know that personally I've received so much inspiration from this summit about what's possible through the church and even just through the passionate leadership of one person, and I feel like God is calling me to step my efforts up through this conference. Here's hoping that Day 3 is fantastic!

P.S. On a totally unrelated topic, I switched my phoine from Telus to Roger's officially. I'll probably blog about that later.

P.P.S. On an utterly completely unrelated topic to either of the previous ones mentioned, I was flipping through channels and I noticed this program on Chinavision titled "Man in Pain". Since it was digital cable, there was a bit of time lag between when you get on the channel and when the picture shows up. I have to say that I was really disappointed when it turned out to be one of those regular Chinese soap operas. Instead, in my mind I formulated a whole new premise for the show where the focus would be on a guy who was in extreme pain, perhaps from a knife to the stomach or because he's on fire. And then as the program gets closer to the end of its 1 hour allotment (because yes, shows like this deserve one whole hour), the writers step up the pain scale by inflicting more pain on him as the show continues on (like a piano landing on him, or a kick in the balls by a homeless man). Yeah I like my idea better...