ACTS banquet

I enjoyed the banquet, held at the Liverpool Holiday Inn. My friend Kathy took this photo, that's Rachel to the left and Jonathan to the right.

The keynote speaker was James Forbes, the former minister for the Riverside Church in NYC. He talked for almost an hour and sometimes I had a hard time following his points - he often seemed to switch gears midstream. Just a different style of speaking I guess. He told a bunch of stories and parables, this was my favorite ("The Tale of the Sands" is a traditional Sufi tale):

Once a bubbling stream was unable to cross the desert despite trying many times. The stream said: "My destiny is to cross this desert, but I can see no way. Whenever I try, I am absorbed into the sand."

The voice of the desert answered, in the hidden tongue of nature, "The wind crosses the desert, and so can you."

The stream said, "The wind can fly, and I cannot."

The desert replied, "You are thinking in the wrong way - trying to fly by yourself is absurd. Allow yourself to be absorbed by the wind and the wind will carry you over the sand and deposit you gently into the mountains on the other side [as rain]."