Willow Creek Conference: Day One (Part One)

Well, the conference started out with a bang.

First, David Crowder came out and he and his band sang a few songs. Here are the songs they played:

1. Coming Toward (instrumental)

2. Here Is Our King

3. I Saw The Light

4. (a new song, pretty good)

5. O Praise Him.

They then left the stage, leaving me wanting more.


But the first speaker for this conference was amazing! His name is DeWitt Jones, and he was a photographer for National Geographic for over twenty years. He had some amazing stories, and then of course showed us some of his stunning photographs. Here are some of the notes I took during his session:

- "The best way to give of ourselves to God is to give of ourselves to one another."

- "Creativity is that moment when we look at the ordinary yet what we see is extraordinary this time."

- "I could either do what I love, or I could love what I do."

He told a story of how he was asked to speak on creativity to some workers in New Jersey, people who only thought of the bottom line - money. It wasn't going that well, and then he had them do an activity. He had them take out a piece of paper and write down five things that fill their cups up, in other words things that give them joy. Then he had them write down the last time that they did any of them. One man stared at his piece of paper for fifteen minutes and then just broke down sobbing. He didn't have anything to put down.

He told another great story of a photo shoot for a scotch company in Ireland where he went out to the "Highland Games" and took photos of these big Irish men throwing stones. The biggest man of all was actually just sitting there, and so he started a conversation with this man. He found out that he used to win the Highland Games all the time. DeWitt asked if he could take some pictures of him at his house, so they went and he took a picture of him throwing a stone, the first time he had done that in many years. Well, that picture became one of the advertisements for this scotch company, and underneath the picture it talked about how this guy still practiced throwing stones all the time (which of course he didn't). It became an award-winning advertisement. Well, this old Irish stone-thrower asked DeWitt to come out again and he showed him that advertisement that he had framed, and on the back were all these signatures. DeWitt asked him where they were from, and the man replied "Well, all these people started calling and writing me to see if that really was me throwing the stone. They wanted to see me in action, so they all showed up, and we had our first family reunion in 200 years!"

Next post will be about the second session, which was some weird urban dance number, Nancy Beach (she works at Willow) and a great song from the worship leader at Mars Hill Bible Church.