Last week, most of the staff from YWAM N.I./Ireland met up for a time of praying, worshiping and hanging-out. Though we try to get together every month or two for similar reasons, the annual staff conference is when we go away somewhere together for a few days and dedicate the entirety of those days to refocusing ourselves as a national community. It’s usually a great time for reviewing the past year, sharing vision, and looking to the future. And it’s a lot of fun to be together.

This year, we didn’t have any speakers from outside our community come and share, as we usually do. Instead, Jonny Clark our national director shared a bit, as well as Renee and our colleague Erin Seibel. We also spent time praying for our focus nations (Serbia, Lebanon, South Africa, India, Rwanda, Burundi, Israel and Palestine) and welcomed a couple new staff.

One of the biggest themes that seemed to come up in our times of prayer and reflection was this idea of sharpening. God seemed to be saying that he wanted to make us, as a community and individually, sharper. We were challenged to look at some of the disappointments of the last year like sparks of metal being shaved off an axe by a metaphorical grindstone, with the goal of restoring the efficacy of that instrument. Renee also brought a story of farming – of planting and growing crops, then the devastation of violent rainstorms, and the farmer not questioning his calling to be a farmer, but replanting in faith and hope the next season.

I think this past season has had some hefty disappointments for the two of us. I feel like the last half-year has been the best part of my life, seeing as it’s been the only time I’ve been married, and being married has been great; but it’s also been one of the most difficult, especially in ministry. God did a lot in us during the latter parts of this summer, as far as rest and restoration goes, but he wants to do more.

Erin shared a word at our staff conference that she had for our organization that really struck me. She described the coast at low-tide when the water leaves all sorts of interesting tidbits exposed in its absence. In essence, this is a time of low-tide for our community, where we can see our mistakes and our triumphs, areas of failing and areas where we excel. This idea really connected with me because I’d physically experienced it a couple weeks ago, standing on the edge of the Irish sea in a little seaside village on the Ards Peninsula. I wrote in my journal:

Yesterday, I walked down to the beach front during a break in the rain to see the tide have taken the sea back a few hundred meters, leaving an apocalyptic landscape of human history exposed to the birds in its retreat. The previous day’s high tide had left frustrated little piles of seaweed and super-size bottles of alcopops (now vacated by their spirits) pushed up against the crumbling wall that marked a theoretical barrier between the seaside village and nature. Yet now, as I looked out at the sea, she seemed to have given up, sick of pushing back against civilization, and made a temporary escape eastward.
I climbed in her wake, over rocks and partially buried tires, past wilting dunes of sea weed peppered with feathers and deflated grocery bags, to an island crowned in lichen, thick with a beard of barnacles, where I stood and surveyed the evidence of my existence. The tide had revealed a no-mans-land of contrasting and indecisive features: the harsh beauty of beaten rock, the softness of sand, an abandoned and rusty lobster cage, a defeated orange flag, partially buried. And most of all, birds …

Pray for us, that we may love the Lord with all our hearts – He who challenges and comforts.

More photos from the staff conference in our photo galleries…