"Embracing Intimacy" was so wonderful! Words just cannot do justice! But we'll try!

Registration began at 5:30pm on Friday. We welcomed 46 women! At least five were from out of town and another five came from other churches in Gaylord. The rest were women from our own Gaylord Community Church.

Worship
I don't know about some of you, but I sort of had this picture in my mind that we were going to start out light on Friday night and end up deep on Saturday night. Boy was I wrong! We took one step out on Friday night and ended up in the deep end of the pool! Our prayer covering was fantastic and the Praise & Worship was just ... really, really good!

Our worship leader, Margie Charboneau, also serves as the Music Director/Worship Leader at Gaylord Community Church. She was accompanied by Chris Scheer, who is our pianist at the church and also happens to be the eldest son of our Pastor. Poor Chris was known all weekend as "the guy" and was teased a lot about being the "rooster in the hen house". Margie brings years of experience and the sweetest sensitivity to the Holy Spirit of anyone I know! And Chris, at the young age of nineteen, flows with her beautifully. Together they brought us all into the presence of God time after time!

The Messages
We had three main topics, all related to each other and to Intimacy.

The first topic was Friendship & Intimacy. Women crave intimate friendships but have often built up walls and created masks to wear because they have been hurt in past friendships. Kelly McCausey encouraged all of the women to let the walls come down and risk closer relationships again; and gave them many good reasons to take the risk.

The second topic was Marriage & Intimacy. Of course that includes the "S*E*X" word! But, Sandra Jensen reminds us all that intimate bedroom relations start with intimate kitchen, living room and everywhere else relations! If we want to have a romantic lover in our bed, we cannot treat them like little boys anywhere else!

Barb Roberts shared her incredible testimony of a healed marriage. There was a time when most who knew them would have given then a one in a million chance of avoiding a divorce. Sexual abuse, drug dependence and alcoholism was just a small part of their past that they had to overcome. But, with God all things are possible and today their marriage is rock solid and full of wonderful intimacy!

Our third topic was Spiritual Intimacy. Pastor Julie O'Dell called everyone to pursue the mountain top meetings with God. God so desires to share a deep and intimate relationship with us! He loves us more than most can imagine. Hopefully, every women there went home with a richer appreciation of God's passion for them.

Body Ministry
If there was anything that really stands out on the weekend it would have to be the incredible amount of "Body Ministry" that took place. On Friday night, after the message, during worship, many women began to go to other women who appeared to "need" someone. It was beautiful!

Our speakers were all available to minister and pray with and many people took advantage of this, but it is a great blessing to see so many of our women go into action. This is how the Body of Christ is supposed to work!

Food & stuff...
We used two conference rooms at our hotel. The larger room served as the "Conference Room." It held eight large round tables with six chairs at each. The smaller room served as our "Fellowship Room" and that is where we set up the refreshments, food and book tables.

On Friday night during registration we served 'substantial snacks' of meatballs, crab rangoon, vegetables, cheese, crackers and chips. We also served several varieties of soda. On Saturday morning we provided a nice continental breakfast bar (since our hotel serves hot breakfasts and not all our registrants were staying at the hotel anyways.) Juice, Fresh fruit, fresh baked croissants, sweet rolls, bagels, cream cheese, jam and butter! Yum-yum!

We didn't plan anything for Saturday evening (most had dinner plans), but we offered left over veggies and some dry snacks for nibbling and continued to offer beverages.

We were able to buy some books on our topics direct from the publisher and we were also able to take some books "on consignment" from the Christian bookstore to offer to our women. We filled up two eight foot tables and ended up selling about $300.00 worth of books. Our profit was about $50.00 - but profit wasn't really the focus, we really wanted to encourage the women to dig deeper into our subject when they got home!