Our Plan B is God’s Plan A

I got back from Calgary about a week ago, where I attended the InScribe Christian Writers’ Fellowship annual Fall Conference. It was also the 25^th anniversary of InScribe under its current name and banner, although the organization has been around a lot longer, AND InScribe Press launched its latest anthology Creativity and Chaos: Artistic Endeavours for Trying Times.

I came away encouraged, refreshed, inspired, and full from reconnecting with my writing “family”. One friend said coming to fall conference is like a family reunion and I couldn’t say it better. EXCEPT there is so much more to this year’s story!

Our keynote speaker was taken ill right before the conference began. She ended up going to emergency and was then hospitalized. After a quick meeting of the conference committee on Thursday evening, we came up with ideas for Plan B, just in case.

An interesting side-note was that during the planning there was some miscommunication with one of our long-time members. She was supposed to do a talk about InScribe’s history during the banquet but she had also prepared a keynote presentation on our conference theme, “Finding the Right Words”. Perfect! Now we had an extra keynote “just in case.” Except…

I’m reminded of a game I used to play with students called “Fortunately/Unfortunately.” It’s a storytelling game where players sit in a circle and we make up a collaborative story. Each person adds to the tale, but the next part must begin by alternating between the words fortunately or unfortunately.

Unfortunately, the woman who was doing the history and who had prepared the extra keynote, broke her foot and also came down with a terrible cold! She couldn’t attend either!  We found someone to read her history, and another person volunteered to give her keynote address on a different day. This same person also volunteered to pick up the slack and do a poetry workshop in place of the original keynote’s Saturday workshop.

Except... THAT person then became ill and couldn’t fulfill their role either. We kept moving from Plan B to Plan C to Plan D… you get the picture. We finally decided that we were going with Plan G  (Plan God!) because He seemed to be doing something completely different than we had imagined.

It actually all turned out amazingly well. I ended up reading the keynote (a very whimsical but wise address that quoted Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwock. Yikes!) I also had the privilege of hosting our annual Author Reading Mixer, which was a ton of fun. We had some impromptu Q & A sessions, some “Open session” style workshops, and two other keynotes that came together miraculously (with virtually no planning.)

One of our organizers commented that sometimes our Plan B was God’s Plan A all along. I love it!

We also launched InScribe Press’s latest anthology CREATIVITY AND CHAOS: ARTISTIC ENDEAVOURS FOR TRYING TIMES. I had been doing a lot of publicity for the book through the summer so it was wonderful to finally see the book “launched”. To learn more about the book, click on the link HERE. 

So? What is the final takeaway? To paraphrase, we make our plans, but the Lord directs our steps. No one could have foreseen the chaos that tried to dismantle this year’s conference. Instead, God blessed attendees beyond what we could have asked or imagined. God is an expert event planner!

Here are more photos from the event: