Just recently I spent a week with my fellow Cru Staff and others at Cru19: a bi-annual Cru staff conference in Fort Collins, Colorado. This year's theme was "Be-cause" and is summed up in this way:

"We want to celebrate together both the

cause that God has called us to and

the fact that God also wants us to be...

be in His presence and be in love with Him."

- www.cru.org

This place was packed with people and events! Between the morning and evening general sessions, workshops, amazing speakers, times of worship, meeting new people, and exploring Fort Collins a little bit, we barely had time to sleep! It's a good thing there was never-ending free coffee.

I wish you could have been there to share this week with me. There is way too much to discuss in this email, but here are some highlights:

This was a huge conference of between 5,000 - 6,000 and when it was time to sing praises to God, that building erupted! There were many talented people on stage all week leading us in song, prayer, and communion.

There were many powerful moments of worship through singing, especially when I would look around to see the great number of people filling the stadium with praise to God, devoting their lives to proclaiming His name! It reminds me of this verse in Hebrews:

Cru19 had some amazing speakers who helped us to reorient ourselves to seek God's heart for the Kingdom, the world, and evangelism. These talks spurred many conversations throughout the week as we sought a deeper understanding of God's Word and our mission within Cru.

Here are a few of my favorite speakers from this week:

• Sandra Van Opstal (On chasing justice)

• Latasha Morrison (On cultural representation) (Shown in photo above)

• James White (Spoke a couple of times on evangelism)

Cru has so many amazing people who I'm blessed to see and spend time with during Cru events. I'm especially excited to be joining the team in San Diego. Pictured up top is the majority of our SD Cru team.

It was also awesome to hang out with an old friend, Jessica Polley (To my left in the 5K race picture above). My brother Dan and I met Ica (as some call her) at a Christian music festival called Cornerstone almost 20 years ago. We had a great time catching up in Fort Collins.