All's Well That Ends Well

Leslie/Todd: 2010 started out pretty rough -- earthquake in Haiti, Muslim/Christian conflict in Nigeria, and floods in Peru. Yet, by year's end, 2010 had turned into a very rewarding year at PEER Servants. That's what we celebrated December 4th at what many considered our best Annual Meeting in PEER Servants in recent years.

We don't meet for large group training meetings as often as we used to in PEER Servants (we do it more now in monthly small group meetings that are focused on specific microfinance partner needs), so perhaps part of the reason we enjoyed the time as much as we did is it was just a time to be together again. There is a pretty strong sense of family within PEER Servants -- the "foundation of fellowship" that is our core value exists within PEER Servants as well as with our microfinance partners. We love to serve, but we also love to play, and we love to dream. 2010 was a year that had all three. And that's what we came together to celebrate at the Annual Meeting.

We celebrated the volunteers that went over and above what anyone would expect in their 2010 service -- Sandy Smith and her dedication to raising tens of thousands of dollars, Dave Leach and his hopping all over the planet to bolster the IT capacities of indigenous Christian MFIs, and Carol Mostrom and her focused, long-term dedication to serving the materially poor of Peru. We celebrated the progress made by many of our microfinance partners on their path to becoming sustainable, transformational MFIs. We celebrated the close walks we had with those microfinance partners in 2010 -- visiting all of our partners with active microfinance programs. We celebrated how our lives had been changed through the impact of our partners and how we could understand more of what it means to follow Jesus given the lessons of 2010.

But we also played! While PEER Servants is family, it is also a group of fierce competitors, and rarely does that come through more clearly than in a heated round of Microfinance Jeopardy. Dave Leach is Alex Trebek and he brought a little of his techno-love to the 2010 Annual Meeting game by having automated clickers replace the need to put unbiased Todd is the hot seat of determining which team responded first. We also maintained our longstanding tradition of the Virtuous Woman Award (I won't even try to explain that in this blog!), with Amy Heimberger taking home the coveted prize.

And we dreamed. That has been true since the early days in PEER Servants and we have never stopped dreaming. We started dreaming at the Annual Meeting of just how fantastic Reciprocity 2011, our July/August global microfinance conference, was going to be. The Les-led Planning Committee painted a picture of what lies ahead, the Reciprocity 2011 worship band gave us a preview of what worship would be like, and the Reciprocity 2011 co-emcee, the incomparable Elie Lafortune, kept us in stitches from the first bite of breakfast (delicious South Asian fare by Reciprocity 2011 co-emcee Sheba Telore) to the closing amen.

It was a great way to close out the year. Serving, playing, dreaming, and all contributing to our becoming more like Jesus. Isn't that what the Kingdom is all about?