Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Prayers leading up to Symposium
We are eager and joyful for Symposium to begin (officially right about now, as we start to check in our guests for tomorrow’s seminars!)
But our hearts were also weighed down with these griefs this week:
http://www.calvin.edu/weblogs/worship/more/preparing_to_pray_at_symposium_2006/
- We are overjoyed that 110 overseas guests have registered for Symposium this year! But another couple dozen of overseas contacts who desperately wanted to come were denied visas, many of them after long travels to embassies and hefty application fees. Each one of them is in our hearts as we worship at Symposium this week, and we are eager to share the learning from Symposium over our website in the weeks to come.
- Two presenters will be unable to join us after sudden events in the past weeks. One had surgery last week, and another is grieving the sudden death of his sister. They, too, will be in our thoughts and prayers these next few days.
- The Calvin College community is reeling from the tragic death of a freshman student, a woman who lived on the same dorm floor of one of our CICW student assistants, and who was a former student of one of our staff member’s spouses. We join with our campus community in grieving this loss.
- January means two main things for us at CICW: Symposium and the application deadline for Worship Renewal Grants. And the mail did bring us a healthy pile of applications, each representing people, possibilities, and communities hungry for worship renewal. The parameters of our grants program mean that we can only fund a fraction of the applications we receive. That’s a lot of eager, creative, worthwhile people and projects that we have to say “no” to. In staff meeting last week, we prayed for all those applicants for whom worship renewal will end up going forward without the assistance of our grants program.