SEND Regional Conference

This year SEND International (the missions organization we are with) held their Regional conference in Ohrid Macedonia. Macedonia neighbors Bulgaria to the south west and we arrived by bus – a 10 hour one way bus ride from Sofia to Ohrid.

The conference was great, the trip home was not. Our bus turned into a traveling petri dish of sickness. The night before we left the conference, three girls came down with “flue-like” symptoms – by the end of the 10 HOUR bus ride home, over half 20+ had the same symptoms of varying degree. I (Marc) unfortunately become one of them. Half way through the trip I got the chills, then the aches, then the fever, then the chills again – you know how it goes. Fortunately I was able to keep my food down, while an unfortunate few were not. The last 5 hours of the bus trip were very unpleasant, but we finally got home at 12:30am Tuesday. I have since recovered, but it was a rough couple of days and I and others had “lingering” effects for about a week. Praise God that Lisa and Drew were able to avoid this mini-plague.

The conference went well. A church from Pennsylvania came over to help run it. They provided the worship, the speaker/teacher and children programs. The purpose of the SEND Conference is to bring all the missionary families from South/Central Europe together for fellowship and to discuss SEND business matters. The countries represented were Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Hungary, Check Republic, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey. All teams gave a country report and shared what was going on within their countries and ministries. SEND also has some business to conduct such as elect new area council members and a new Area Director was moved into office. I enjoyed this piece as I was able to see how SEND operates as an organization and how their leadership structure is put into place. I was also very nice to meet all of the other missionary families. There were 30 family units there – most of them with kids. The supporting church from Pennsylvania also brought about 15 people.

We greatly enjoyed the worship and teaching. It did not hit me until we were there singing that this was the fist time in 8 months that we were worshiping God in our own language with other believers. The teaching was also very practical to our current situation – we appreciated it very much. It was a great time to “re-center” on an emotional and spiritual level.