Steadfast Anchor of Hope: Hopespoken and processing

Almost a year ago, my sister Jaquelyn snagged us a couple of tickets for Hopespoken, a Christian women's conference about sharing our hope in Christ. For the entire weekend of the conference last year, our IG feeds exploded with picture after picture of this beautiful conference, it literally looked like the most fun thing in the entire world!

In reality I almost didn't get to go. Because Nathan and I would be married by the time I would go, he was just going to get my ticket after work the day that they came out. I had no clue that they would be gone so quickly and I didn't see a problem with waiting. Well, at midnight, when Jaquelyn was getting hers, she decided she might as well get mine just so she could be sure we could go together. It is a good thing she did! By 10am (probably earlier) that morning they were sold out =O

It seemed like Hopespoken would never get here. We were looking forward to it for so long! But, it did, and it is actually over as of Sunday. To be honest I have a lot of mixed emotions about this past weekend. It was full of excitement, nervousness, new people, noise, speakers, and exhaustion. I have been processing in myself and verbally to Nathan and family since we got back, so I wanted to record some of those things here :) This post will be all the things that I loved while at Hopespoken; maybe eventually I'll post about the things that I didn't really agree with.

So, what I really enjoyed!

1. We survived the flight there and back! It was only the third and fourth flights of my life and my first ones without Nathan, so I was pretty nervous. At least Jaquelyn was there! The only hiccup was, when we were at Tampa airport their machine did not want to take my boarding pass, even though all the info was right. Thankfully they just let me through!

2. We were able to meet the most wonderful people! Some that we had purposefully set out to meet since we follow them on IG, and others that we had never heard about before.

Two of those women were the sweetest ever, and it was just so crazy wonderful to meet them. They were actually on the shuttle we took from the airport, but in the very back so we didn't really have any contact. When they were dropped off Jaquelyn and I had a hunch they were there for the conference since they were staying in the same hotel, but we were going across the street, so again, no contact. It just so happened that that night at dinner, they came and sat down next to us. After a few minutes we both kind of realized that we had been on the same shuttle! We hung out with them the whole weekend, and it was so great. They are sisters as well, the oldest and second oldest like Jaquelyn and I, and both their names start with J! Jenni and Julie. We were the J posse the whole weekend ;)

I also had the pleasure of meeting some ladies who I have "stalked" =P on IG pretty much as long as I have had an account. The wonderful Stephanie Holden, her daughters - Elizabeth, Lydia, and Lauren - and her newest granddaughter, Hazel! It was so wonderful to meet all of them. I was only able to get a picture with Stephanie and Lydia though :)

Also a sweet lady named Rachel (sadly no picture...), plus a few others as well!

3. Saturday night we had things called share groups. Basically there were groups with different categories and you could choose to go to one so you could meet other ladies in your season of life. I guess last year they only had a few categories which left a lot of ladies out. Thankfully they seemed to catch the mistake and had lots of options this year! I went to the married without children group, and there were about 10 other ladies. Goodness, it was so fun and encouraging! Rachel and Lydia were there, and all the other women were just so sweet! We talked about our husbands, our stories, hard parts about marriage, date nights, the wonderful things about marriage, future children, and just got to know each other. I ended up crying when I started talking about Nathan, I missed him so much! Thankfully they didn't mind ;)

4. Ruth Simons and Stephanie Holden's sessions. Ruth's was on finding your identity in Christ, who He is and what He has done, rather than self-esteem in yourself. Recently I've been thinking about the dangers in self-esteem since it was brought up in our parenting class, so it was refreshing to hear her speak.

Stephanie's session was called "the story of Grace upon Grace". She shared some of her recent story with her newest granddaughter and youngest daughter moving, etc. and also read through and shared on Romans 12. It was wonderful for her to spend so long in an entire passage of scripture and she is just the sweetest, most gracious woman who is so content in what God has called her to.

5. The market. The market was so fun and I was able to meet a sweet lady I follow on IG. Love all the handmade things! I bought a cute tassle necklace and also some cards.

6. The fact that the music team that led had a guy playing the cello - that was pretty cool!

Here are a few pictures from the weekend - there are ton up on Hopespoken.org that are way better than mine as well. The room was dark almost the whole weekend, which was great for the mood and also extremely pretty, but horrible for Iphone pics ;)