I’ve finally managed to delegate some of the tasks to my “helpers”. Right now, I’m sitting at home and taking a break from the services. Eva and Emil are handling the current seminar, and there’s only one meeting to go now: The final service this evening.

It’s been a long week. I’ve worked from early morning to late at night every day and it’s nice to take a break. Tomorrow we’re going to tear everything down and then the conference is over. What a ride.

We have lunch every day for the conference volunteers; free lunch tickets have been handed out to us so we can eat lunch for free. But I find that I haven’t used a single one of them; instead, I like to sneak away and hide out in a little nearby restaurant which is almost empty most of the time. There I sit (in the sweltering heat, unfortunately), in quietness, with no one to bother me, and enjoy a nice, hot meal. It’s become my little sanctuary, or haven of rest, in this crazy week.

But everything has worked out, the conference seems to be a smashing success. Some people downtown were probably taken aback by the size of it; I heard of at least one restaurant that ran out of food trying to accomodate all the participants. And it’s been all over the news, and the reports have been very nice.

Most of our time is spent handling the worship. We have two large projectors running the worship texts on big screens; and as soon as the worship team appears on stage, we spring into action. Using run lists prepared in advance – and with a little chat program I whipped together – we’re able to synchronize excellently. The worship team can take off in any direction, and we’ll be right behind with texts and information presented on the screens.

It does get a little tricky though, especially when the hub had a power lapse and knocked out the communication temporarily. And when the phone is ringing at the same time as the worship is going on, or people jump up from everywhere with messages that need to go up on the screens, at the same time as Lisa, our fantastic worship leader, takes off in a new direction. A high stress tolerance is suggested, for sure.

It’s strange how panic and crisis can appear before every single meeting, but it always does somehow. Some guy jumps up 30 minutes before and says “hey, we’re going to do this song, can you put it up during the meeting” and we don’t even have the song text. Or when some other guy comes in with a video and says “can you run this a few times before the service” – which means very, very hastily trying to find a program that can play it (or at least figure out why WinAmp can’t run things on screen #2), trying to get an audio line from the computer all the way over to the sound guys, coordinating with everything else and hoping to dear God that everything will work out. Somehow it does. Maybe it’s the angels around us.

I think this conference has had a large impact on our town. Skövde is on the map now. Lots of interesting things happen. Whether it’s effected us profoundly remains to be seen though… but I have a feeling that those running the prayer behind the scenes won’t let people off that easily. It’s going to continue out from our little Arena.

Well, now it’s less than six hours to go till the end. Busy week. This must be how it feels to work for Dan. :)