Friday Shall Be the New Day of Rest

Tomorrow is our areawide women's conference. Most of my waking hours for the past couple of weeks have been dedicated to it. I'm really excited about it, though. We're expecting about two hundred women. Today we took Verônica shopping for the food(oh the blessing/curse of owning a car!). She (and several dear sweet sisters) are making Bahian food for everyone. This involved getting up at 6:00 this morning to go to the big food market downtown. It was an incredible amount of food. Scratch that--it was a believable amount of food for the number of people. The unbelievable part was the amount of okra we bought. Yes, my southern friends, we eat okra here. It's a part of a couple of traditional dishes. But Brazilian okra puts yours to shame: it's about eight inches long. And we bought TWO THOUSAND okra. (Okras? Okri?)

As I write, the last of my handouts are printing. My lessons are done, the "to bring" piles are huge, and the "to do" list has shrunk. There is no more "to do"--at this point it's either done or it's not going to happen. I know there will be bumps tomorrow--things people think weren't done adequately, things people think are missing, things that really are missing due to my baby brain--but it should be a great day. And at this time tomorrow night I will be back home, in my little bed, resting up for my in-laws visit. (Truthfully, I will be resting up so I can CLEAN for my in-laws visit!)

Please pray for our conference tomorrow. Pray that the words we speak will be understood and will make an impact on the hearers. Pray that we can keep our stress levels to a minimum and sit back and enjoy the day (I'm not kidding about the sitting part--I've discovered that pregnant Val doesn't do well if she's on her feet all day!). Pray that this event brings sisters from all the other congregations closer together. Pray that I can keep that goal in my mind--it's really the point of the whole thing, but it's easy to get distracted by all the details.