It will start somewhere around Thursday morning.  My suitcase will be packed, my travel mug will have a special blend with caramel in it and I’ll be on the road to get to the Jacksonville airport in time to catch my 12:30 flight to St. Louis.

It’s finally time for the Write About Jesus (WAJ) conference.  I attended my first one in 2003 and then went back in 2004 and 2005.  I had to miss it last year for the first time and I have been looking forward to WAJ 2007 ever since then!

My dear friend, P. will meet me at the St. Louis airport at 1:30.  We met in 2003 when she was attending WAJ for the first time, too!  We had just come out of our first critiquing class on Saturday morning and we started chatting on the way to the bathroom.  We just hit it off.  I felt like I’d known her forever.  We were both relatively new at the writing thing and talked about how scared we were to be there.  We hung around the rest of the day and exchanged phone numbers before we left. 

We did keep in touch.  Her family even stopped in Valdosta one summer on their way to Florida and we met in a restaurant so our families could finally meet each other, and the next summer our family stopped in and spent the night in Arnold, MO with P. and her family on our way to a nephew’s wedding!

It will be good to see her Thursday and spend the next few days with her.  I’ve loved seeing how God has blessed her writing ministry.  She’s just recorded her first CD this month!  Cool!

Friday and Saturday will be spent in classes and there will be a lot of note taking on my part.  The classes are amazing because of the clinicians who teach them.  They seriously love writing songs and they seriously love sharing about what they do best!  When I first thought about what it would be like to meet successful songwriters, I never pictured the generous group of teachers that are at WAJ.  Honestly, they are incredibly gifted and some of the nicest people you will ever meet.  

There will be a concert Friday night where the writers will sing songs that have been “cut” by an artist, and then they’ll sing a new song that is about to be pitched…..or maybe a personal old favorite of theirs; one that they don’t necessarily expect to get cut, but knew they just had to write.  It’s always an amazing night!

There may be an opportunity to do some more co-writing which would be totally awesome!  Several of the writers from the writing retreat I attended this past May will be at WAJ.  (was that really five months ago?)

Today will be spent tying up loose ends at work and then rushing home and making sure that I have everything packed that needs to be packed.  And there will be the last minute trip to Wal-mart to pick up the things that I’ve forgotten.  I need to go buy a new book to read on the plane.