Happy to report I got home safely today and no mishaps over the weekend. It was a really summerlike weekend actually at the Charity Grace Bible Camp in Peoria, IL. Everybody was friendly and down-to-earth and there was so much good food that I will have to really start to cut back tomorrow!
On the way home I actually was able to get a Big Beef from a Portillo's in Champaign, along with stopping at Culver's for two Bacon Deluxes to bring home for dinner with my mom. We always take frozen Idahoan extra-crispy crinkle cut fries from the grocery and put them in the air fryer--they taste pretty close to good fast-food fries and taste better because you're eating them hot.
So many good conversations took place around the Word and applying it to our different situations. People come to this conference every year from faraway places like northern Wisconsin, eastern Pennsylvania, Buffalo, NY, and northern Minnesota.
Billy Elmquist is a fabulous street-preacher in Minnesota and he now drives a really big OLD school bus with Bible verses written all around it in large lettering.
I sat with his wife at breakfast this morning and she says she feels they've even outgrown the school bus in some ways. The have five children with another one on the way!
She really gave an impassioned testimony to the power of putting salvation bumper stickers on your car so I bought one at the conference. It's in gold lettering with a black background. The verse is Romans 5:8: [8] But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
I immediately tried to place it on the back of my 2005 Nissan but it wouldn't stick! It has to be that my car collected quite a bit of dust driving on gravel county roads to get to the campsite, which was in Low Point, IL.
The nearest little village was Metamora and we went into town once just to check it out. It had a really cute downtown square with a gazebo structure in the middle. The cutest thing there were bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd in the little park area around the gazebo.
I realized coming home that the biggest message I got from all the preaching, including the conversations with preachers inside the dining hall, is that I need to trust God with absolutely everything. It sounds so simplistic and it is! God says throughout His Word in a million-trillion different ways, "Trust me."
Barney Monroe, the preacher who has organized and maintained this very special conference through the years, told us in one of the evening meetings that we should look up the old hymn, "Do You Tremble?"
I did try a little while ago and couldn't find it anywhere online. The song he had us sing each night and then this morning was, "It is Well With My Soul." Somehow I think that is his favorite hymn, just like it is with my pastor in Chicago.
My longtime friend Trish happened to be sitting next to me last night when we sang it and I whispered to her between that hymn and the next one, "What's your favorite hymn?"
To my pleasant surprise she answered, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," which is what I've always considered as my favorite hymn since I was little!
Got a lot of little chores to handle now that I'm back home, as well as being tired from the long drive and not-so-great sleep in a bunk bed inside a small cabin with three other people, so will post more stuff tomorrow.
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