After a false start this morning (i.e., the alarm clock went off two hours earlier because of it advancing when setting the time for the alarm), and then not being able to get back to sleep (of course), it was off to the airport and down to BWI to go to the Conference Center at the Maritime Institute in Linthicum Heights, MD. For the first time the General Ordination Examination readers' conference is happening here, rather than at Camp Allen, Navasota, TX as it did from 2000-2006 and before then, at a variety of places, once upon a time seminaries and other conference and retreat centres.
My room is on the seventh floor (with heat because apparently some rooms don't have it), with a corner window view of Baltimore (which the above photo doesn't really show very well). I don't have a sense of the airport being right next door, even though it's a five-minute drive away (which is one of the big reasons why we are meeting here).
I am all set up with the (un)trustworthy computer (after last November, I will always be cautious), iPod and little speaker gizmo, external hard drive, and all those other electronic items that make our life less simple and more complicated.
Perhaps later I will be able to comment on what this whole process means. For tonight, because my eyelids are about to shut, what it means is once again seeing a bunch of people whom I haven't seen in a year, getting together to catch up, and knowing that tomorrow we really start working hard. Everyone who is here loves the church and in such a short amount of time, we are able to come together and coalesce.
Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping,
that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.
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