Spilling Over

It’s a weird, wonderful time of year again. I’ve returned to a place I only came once before, to find that it is a place I belong, just like I’ve suspected since I left a year ago.I’m back at Hutchmoot.

I was trying to find words yesterday evening, over dinner, for what last year’s Hutchmoot meant to me. I fished about, “It was…” I looked at Christine for help. “Life changing,” she said.

Yeah. That about says it.

We sat in the Square Peg Alliance and Friends concert last night, and my friends who came with me had tears running down their face. Both of them, after the end, said, “I’m so full – and the sessions haven’t even begun yet!”

Christine turned to me as the music stopped. “I just remember you coming back last year, and going to Cosi for dinner and you sitting there with your notebook and spilling out everything you’d heard and seen and learned…Yeah. I get it now, really.”

You have to spill over from this place. You have to spill over from what is poured into you.

I can’t say if this year’s conference will be as “life-changing” as last year’s. I doubt it could be. I’m not expecting that it should be.

But I brought two friends with me – the spilling over of what I experienced a year ago, the sharing of an experience I shall not capture again. But I am certain I will be filled. As will my friends. And we will spill over that fulfillment into the lives we touch as we return.

That, friends, is why I’m at Hutchmoot again.