Yesterday I was able to attend the Oklahoma Christian University (OC) Lectureship and what a blessing that was! But shamefully, I feel I need to admit, what I was looking forward to the most was the guest speaker that evening, Missy Robertson. You see Missy is the wife of Jase Robertson one of the many stars of the hit reality tv show Duck Dynasty. There was a lot of buzz about her coming and I was excited to hear what she had to say.
Missy was coming for dinner, She Speaks. I made a sign up on the church bulletin board, if you wanted a spot you have to sign up because they would sell out. Sell out they did, but not before I had our 16 tickets reserved.
Dinner didn't start until 5:30 but the Lectureship was still going which meant there was a lot of great speakers I could go listen to. I was able to attend the Area Wide Teen Gathering with some of the youth from our church Sunday night and hear the first keynote speaker, Kent Allen, from Memorial Road Church of Christ. He did a wonderful job and spoke about how as a church it is our responsibility to not be an audience in our faith but rather an army. We are not to come, listen, criticize, leave and forget what we just heard that we disagreed with. We are to come, be motivated, encouraged, empowered, and then go to battle until we are together again. We are to be an army not an audience. It was a great lesson and I will post some of my favorite notes from the lectureship soon.
Monday morning they offered a Ladies Day. The entire theme of the lectureship was the future of the church, so I was fairly excited to go to the ladies day to hear more effective ways to serve. We loaded up and left around 7:30 that morning to make it up in time to start and man did we have some great speakers. Again, notes to come soon!
Some of our ladies went out and enjoyed a nice lunch and chatted then we returned to hear a few more lessons. But the big even was to come. I sat through a Restoration of the New Testament Church lessons which was interesting but not what I was really looking forward to.
The next 2 hours were Q & A so we slipped out and visited the bookstore then just chatted until it was time to find the rest of our group before the big dinner!
We got there early, eagerly waited to get our seats. Right before we began in came Missy with a small crowd around her. They ushered her in the back door where we were clearly not welcome for a few minutes and then out to their table at the front of the venue. The welcome began promptly at 5:30 and it went all right from there.
Missy gave a decent lesson, the best part was her daughter, Mia, talking about herself and then singing for us. I wasn't expecting the singing at all. It was Missy, her mother, and Mia. It was beautiful. Thank you, here's your gift bag, and they were escorted back out the same door in which they came with while we were watching a clip of next years speaker. As I was watching this clip, and being oddly hyper aware of everything going on, I realized how wrong I had been.
For well over a month, I had anxiously awaiting this dinner to hear what words of wisdom that Missy had to pass to us. I guess I had it all built up, I mean, here we have a family of Christians that have wowed the entertainment industry with their humor and faith and no one can really explain.
It was anticlimactic. But what I really enjoyed, was every other single speaker that I heard that day!
No-body people, teachers, moms, preachers, missionaries. People the rest of the world will never find important, they shared hope. They shared their hope for our church, for the future of our church. It was amazing.
So there I sat, in a gym with 800 other people, watching the lady I had been anxiously waiting to see for some time now leaving like we had the plague, and listening to Nika Maples tell part of her amazing story and realized that I had once again put my hope in man instead of in God. And yet again, I was disappointed and God made his point.
I heard some amazing lessons from some great people, I learned more in all the little speakers that were just side dishes to what I thought was the main course.
Refocus and start again. Today, I will do better.
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