YL75

Every four years, Young Life does a big conference for the staff. It started in 1996 and used to be called the All Staff Conference. As Young Life has grown exponentially around the world, all of the staff can't get there. So it's now called a Young Life Celebration. This year, we celebrated Young Life's 75th Anniversary with 5,000 YL Staff from all over the world. This was our 5th YL Celebration. As always, we felt loved, cared for, appreciated, encouraged, inspired and a host of other things. My heart was full from a great week with people we dearly love and are thankful to do ministry with. Some of the highlights included:

The parade of flags. Young Life is now in 99 countries!

At the YL College PreConference, Cameron and Ben got to have dinner at Epcot with Minnie and Mickey. This picture represents WVU and Marshall!

 

Incredible Speakers who all have personal connections with Young Life and were incredibly personal with us as a staff:

Matt Chandler

Louie Giglio

Jen Hatmaker

Efram Smith

Jefferson Bethke

Joni Erickson Tada

Dave Ramsey

David Crowder led worship one night.

LaCrae came for our last night celebration.

One of my favorite times of worship was when the international staff led worship.

Tom's founder Blake Mycoskie has a Young Life background. They gave all 5,000 staff a free pair of sunglasses.

We had our 75th Birthday Party at Hollywood Studios one night. They shut down the park for us to spend a few hours playing together, eating and watching amazing fire works. 

They even left the lights on one more night for us.

Photo Cred: Disney

Photo Cred: Disney

Susie Berg and I became Uber guru's with a few trips to the grocery store and Disney Springs.

We didn't do one of the parks on the free day because we opted to use our tickets the following week when the kids came down. So we had R&R which equaled doing laundry and going to Walmart (all in prep for the following week.) It was almost like I was at home. We hit up dinner and an evening at Disney Springs with the Bergs.

 We call this the "Don't go on two, you always go on two" picture.

 

Friends always do my heart good. These girls have all filtered through or come from Charleston over the last 15 years. They now represent Young Life in New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Denny Rydberg, the president of YL, is retiring in November after 22 years. Young Life has grown in tremendous ways under his leadership. On our last night he gave his last address to as many staff as that would be together before his retirement. Each of us got 5 finger lights which each represent 335 kids that have been reached during his time of leadership. It was really beautiful.

Ben didn't feel great for most of the week. Which was a bummer. But we made the most of it. The weather was cool but we managed one day by the pool with friends eating massive nachos and even squeezing in the new water slides a time or two.

We were totally blessed beyond measure by this week. I am so grateful.