I'm here!!

1. Yesterday I had a 'waving committee' to see me off at the airport: Kathy Johnson and her daughter Emma drove me out. Ben came along and his girlfriend Xiomara also joined us out there. We also met up with Kathleen Wilson arriving back from Ireland,and her parents who had come to pick her up. So it was a great send-off and I managed to hold back the tears till just when we got to the security gate. Tomorrow I will hopefully gain the techno know-how to send pics from that send -off.

So here I am in Holland - a beautiful, clean, lush green neat country, just as I expected. I travelled with 5 other girls coming to the conference and everything went pretty well without a hitch. It was great having others to be with as we travelled and changed planes, etc. - and of course, I was the mom of the group as I am old enough to be any of these girls' mother. We arrived in Amsterdam very tired (all we saw of the city was the airport) and were ushered fairly promptly, along with many other OM'ers coming from different countries, onto a waiting bus.

It was a two-hour drive from there to this beautiful Christian conference centre at DeBron. What a lovely place!
It was raining a bit when we arrived, but that was ok. They fed us a hot meal, registered us, gave us some time to rest before dinner and a brief evening meeting. It was especially warming to be greeted enthusiastically by Junia and by Sue, my friends from the OM Canada office. There are 270 new recruits here from 41 different countries all over the world (e.g. Australia, Malaysia, Ukraine, South America, South Africa, etc.). We had an inspiring time of worship and a brief word of encouragement from John 15 - our need to be pruned so that we may produce fruit. Some things in our lives that are fruitless need to be put to death and things that can produce fruit need to be nurtured. Then we prayed for each other in small groups. Already I have met people from Korea, Malaysia, USA, New Zealand and people who are goint to Kazakhstane, Tajikstan, Sudan, South Africa, and many other countries. This really is amazing as you can walk around the lovely conference grounds in a very pastoral setting (with a pastoral country smell!) and hear languages from all over the world. Every person you meet the questions are 'Where are you from?' and Where are you going?' A lot of the young people are going to work on the OM ships.
My roommate is a woman from California who is working with Turning Point, a ministry to Muslims in London, England. She, like me, has come into overseas missions at a mature age. :-)

What else do I need to tell you? Oh yeah - they have set up a great internet cafe here in the conference centre and a guy named Greg helps us get set up and going. He is going to help me get my puter set up and working with wireless and I'm sure I can ask him to help me figure out how to download photos from my camera to the computer. If so, there will be pictures here tomorrow. But right now I am going to bed. More from deBron later this week...
Thank you to everyone who is praying for me and sending me notes of encouragement. There have been a few moments in the last 24 hours when the immensity of what I have done has hit with intense emotion. Pray that I will have the time with the Lord to keep everything in focus. God bless you all!