NYWC St. Louis - The Day in Review

Well, it's almost midnight again in St. Louis and we are just getting settled in after a very busy day at the National Youth Worker's convention.

This hotel is really really nice, much nicer than anything I could afford to stay in if I weren't here on "business" and I'm sure waaaaayyyy nicer than the room Jenn and I will be sharing in Atlanta. That is just to say that I slept great last night after finally turning in at 1:30 AM. The alarm went off too soon this morning, so we grabbed a quick breakfast before heading back to the show floor to start this marathon Friday.

At no point today would I call the show floor crowded. We were busy in the booth several times, but nothing compared to what I've experienced working the booth at Macworld. We had a lot of MediaShout "haters" come through today, as well as some Mac fanatics who were excited to see LiveWorship running great on my MBP. Sometime around noon Garfield called in with a Leopard update, so I was able to demo LW on 10.5 for most of the afternoon, which went great!

What makes Friday at YW so busy is that if you are working the show, and plan to attend the general sessions there is simply no time at all to stop and smell the roses. We ran the booth from 9 till 12:30, caught the first Gen Session from 1-3:30, reopened the booth from 3-7, and then hit the final general session from 7:30-10, by which point we were both hungry so grabbed some quick dinner at a restaurant down the block.

Gen Session number 1 was really really good. FlatFoot 56 (an "old school punk band with celtic overtones" ) did nothing for me, but Duffy Robbins and David Crowder Band were simply amazing. Duffy was funny, and powerful and really drove home a great message about letting God be God and not trying to screw it up for Him. I heard DCB do Remedy for the first time live and it left me in awe... What a great song, what a great band.

Gen Session number 2 featured DCB again, which was fantastic. There was also this guy at both general sessions who did performance art by moving sand around on a table. It's hard to explain, but it was really really cool. The speaker at Gen Session # 2 was a guy named Chris Hill. We probably missed a great talk, but he didn't catch my attention right off the bat so we split to come in search of dinner about 10 minutes into his lesson.

Marko's pre session pep talk was very good and I hope that in Atlanta I can take his advice to heart and use my time at YW to "get away" with God and with Jenn for some much needed rejuvenation.

The only other huge highlight of the day that I can think of off-hand is that I had a great conversation with a few of the ladies from YouthWorks over by their booth on the show floor today. What a great group of folks! I'm so excited for our HS mission trip next summer! Can't wait to be able to tell the kids where we are headed and get the ball rolling on plans.

Well, it's been a good day. Busy, but good. I'm tired, and tomorrow is bound to be long again.

More later, Roogles out.