Hearts at Home holds 3 conferences annually in the center of the country. I attended the Great Lakes Regional conference in Grand Rapids last year. I'll share with you what the experience was like for me at my first Hearts at Home experience.
We arrived on a Friday evening and joined thousands of other moms for an evening of music, drama, and fun. The speaker was Lisa Welchel ("Blair" from "The Facts of Life" for those of you born by 1980) who was very entertaining and encouraging. At the end of the evening we had a chance to shop through the huge store of resources that they had brought along and set up in the conference center. The Friday night session is considered a "Mom's Night Out" and it was a great way to spend a Friday night!
We enjoyed a leisurely evening and woke up early the next morning for the full day of workshops. We had a few main sessions featuring Lisa again. My friend and I also attended 4 workshops that day. Some of our workshops overlapped, some did not. We each had picked 10 sessions that seemed interesting to us, and the conference coordinators made sure that each person got to attend 4 of the 10 they had picked. A lunch was provided for us and we met up to eat together. The day was capped off with a great worship session and send-off. We took some time to look through the "store" again and then walked a few blocks to the downtown area and had a great meal.
One of my favorite parts of the whole experience was when my friend and I sat down that evening and looked over the notes we had taken. We shared what we learned at the sessions we weren't in together. It was like I had gone to 7 instead of my 4! It was a great time of processing what I had learned. It was that night that we decided we were making the trip back to the same conference this year! It was so moving and impactful that we knew we needed to make it a priority to come again. I returned home renewed, refreshed, and "recharged" with a new outlook on how to be the best mom and wife I could be!
After all this talk of what Hearts at Home is all about, it makes you want to go, doesn't it? Well there's still time to sign up for these conferences:
October 3-4, 2008 Grand Rapids, Michigan
November 7-8, 2008 Rochester, Minnesota
March 13-14, 2009 Bloomington, Illinois
If you don't live close enough to drive to a conference, and hopping on a plane isn't an option, you can also order a Home Conference Packet which gives you the conference via CD. That's a nice deal for the nursing mother that's not ready to leave her little one and come as well! Visit http://www.hearts-at-home.org for more info.
Don't forget to leave a comment about how you keep your "mommy batteries" charged to be entered in the drawing to receive a Hearts at Home resource!
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