Best of 2011: Ten Completely Unspiritual Things I Learned at the Beth Moore Conference

Original Run Date:  August 27, 2011.  This post was a “Plan B” type of post.  I wrote it after “Plan A” fell through.  And it ended up being my highest-traffic-producing post of the year.  Go figure.

This post was supposed to be the one where I tell you how Beth Moore heard directly from God, spoke what she heard with eloquence, and left me completely undone. This was supposed to be the post where I try to decode the 10 pages of notes I furiously and frantically scribbled, so that I can share with you all of the deep spiritual truths she extracted and eloquently shared from the Word of God. This was supposed to be the post where I move you to tears as I describe the special bonding weekend I had with my 12-year-old daughter, my sister-in-law and my 12-year-old niece in our annual Girls’ Weekend.

And finally, this was supposed to be the post where I provoke you to action as I describe the ways I’m committing myself to study, do and teach everything I learned from Beth Moore at the Living Proof Live Event.

And all that would be 100% true and completely accurate.

D’oh!

So, instead of all that, I’ll give you the severely watered-down /behind-the-scenes/unplugged version of the post. Trust me, this is harder than it looks. Because when you are sitting in a Beth Moore Bible Study of any kind, you can be a stinking cockroach on the floor and absorb something spiritual. It takes real talent to come up with something irrelevant and nonsensical.

And with that Intro of Pure Awesomeness, I give you:

The Ten Completely Unspiritual Things I Learned at the Living Proof Live Event:

1. Wearing a flowy black top, dark flared jeans and high heels is a very flattering outfit for all body types.

2. After this conference, 7,000 women, give or take, went shopping for a flowy black top, dark flared jeans and high heels. And went to their perspective salons to get layers cut into their hair like this. Talk about pure awesomeness.

3. Beth Moore uses the grease from 10 slices of bacon (but not the bacon itself) to make her cornbread stuffing at Christmas.

4. It is a moral injustice, plain and simple, that Beth Moore can eat bacon grease and still look like this.

5. Speaking of Christmas, my zoom lens on my nice camera (the camera that was my Christmas present to myself) takes great shots from afar…

6. Except when the subject gets too close. There’s just no way to switch out lenses quickly enough when the subject is walking toward you at a fast clip.

7. Leaving your nice Christmas-present-to-yourself-camera in the hands of two 12-year-olds means you later find about 50 pictures that look like this.

8. When 40-something-year-old women are wiping away tears and frantically scribbling down 10 pages of notes, 12-year-old-girls are drawing mustaches on the pictures in the program

(insert picture here of 12-year-old’s mustache-drawing, except that the program in question is sitting in a car 150 miles away)

9. I have a female, Christian 40-something-year-old friend who has never heard of Beth Moore. Yes, she is from the U.S. And no, she is not Amish, nor does she live in a cardboard box or in any sort of seclusion, voluntary or otherwise.

10. Riding home in a car for 3 hours alone with your daughter, basking in the afterglow of a Living Proof Live Event, is an excellent opportunity to share with her a few nuggets of wisdom she will need later in life. Like the lyrics to Black Water, by the Doobie Brothers. You just never know when she will need to chime in to a little of THIS:

I’d like to hear some funky Dixieland
Pretty mama come and take me by the hand
By the hand (hand), take me by the hand pretty mama
Come and dance with your daddy all night long
(Repeat into fade)

My heart swells with pride, knowing that when the time comes, my daughter is now prepared for such a moment.

I warned you, this would be irrelevant and nonsensical.

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Fall 2011 also brought one of my personal favorite series:  Everything I Want You to Know About Adoption.  To see all the links to individual posts in that series, click here