Mayhem was very cool, mostly for the relational thing, from my point of view. One of the coolest things was meeting so many people from the blogosphere and putting names with the faces. I met Eric Keck, who is much younger than I thought he was. (Not that I thought he was all that old—he just looks so young!) I met Beth Keck, who is absolutely gorgeous and a great singer/songwriter. She provided some of the worship for us. Oh yeah, mustn’t forget—I met Tom Mohan, which was very cool, since he’s a semi-regular commenter. I had no idea he was planning to be there, and when I saw his nametag, I’m like, “Are you the Tom Mohan? I’m Debi from the Scriptorium!” How high-school-reunion of me! I met Todd Hunter, who has been such a help to Alan in encouraging him to hang in there. Gosh, I met so many people I can’t remember them all! What was truly bizarre is the number of people who saw my nametag and said that they enjoyed reading my blog. That was cool, but a little disconcerting. Makes me feel like I have to come up with something profound now. Oh well, if that happens, it’ll be accidental, let me assure you!

Most of the time I spent at the coffee machine and the drink/snack table, helping Liz with the never-ending task of keeping everyone coffeed-up. Liz had it pretty much under control; I just kept supplies stocked and filled coffeepots with water for the next round and such. Probably the most fun I had was at dinner on Friday night. We had a kind of buffet, with several different kinds of sandwiches, cookies, chips, and drinks. Everyone lined up and filed through, and I kept the trays going, replacing empty ones with full ones. But, that way I got to meet pretty much everybody. I met some fellas from Toronto who were a lot of fun (Canadians have such a great sense of humor!). There were people there from Oregon, Florida, Massachusetts, and several points in between. I think all in all there were about 260 people there. Pretty cool.

Brian McLaren was the main “speaker”, and he spoke 3 different times during the weekend. I got to serve him coffee (dig me!), but really didn’t get to hear him speak much, because I was helping at the coffee station. I’m not complaining though, because I got to go to the round-table discussions on Saturday, and they were very cool. There were 5 to pick from in the morning, and 6 to pick from in the afternoon. In the morning, I went to one about dealing with “relational mutts”, or people who have a hard time connecting with other people for one reason or another. That was very helpful, especially with the ministry I’m beginning to volunteer with (which, no, I haven’t told you about yet—I’ll get to it!). In the afternoon, I went to a round-table headed by Mollie and Bill Bean, entitled “Sleeping Single in a Simple Church”. I was a little depressed at first that the group consisted of about fifteen 20-somethings and me, but it turned out cool. I got to show them another side of the picture, that if your life is fulfilling in other ways, the “mate” issue doesn’t loom quite so large. Or at least I hope that’s how it came out. :^)

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot—I got some really good photos during the weekend. They’re posted on my fotopage.

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