I’ll be headed for Sewanee this weekend to meet with Frank and Megan (I haven’t heard if Carolyn will be there or not) in preparation for the Costa Rica trip.

I’m preparing for the preparation by reviewing some of the content of LEAMIS’s pastoral leadership seminar. The plan last year in Bolivia was for Debra Snellen and I to co-lead the seminar. Co-lead it we did, but because of some misunderstandings, poor scheduling and a failure to promote the seminar to its intended audience, we really did only a small fraction of it, for a handful of people, none of whom fell into the category of the rural pastors for whom the seminar is designed.

Now, this year, I’m supposed to lead the whole thing, by myself, and I’m a little intimidated by that. It’s not my curriculum. Will I be able to answer questions or deal with unexpected directions to the discussion? I’m going to have to count on a lot of divine inspiration.

Well, the dates of my LEAMIS International Ministries mission trip to Costa Rica are shifting back by a day or two — I will now leave on July 5 or 6 instead of July 4. (I haven’t updated the countdown widget yet — I will when I get the exact date.)

But that’s not all that’s shifted.

The trip is going to have three team members — me, our fearless leader Frank Schroer, and Megan Segrist, who will serve as our interpreter. (Megan was a member of our 2006 Kenya team.) And now, we will be visiting several locations in Costa Rica instead of spending the whole week in one place as we originally planned.

What’s more — I, by myself (except for Megan translating, of course) will be leading a LEAMIS leadership workshop. That’s intimidating.

LEAMIS has developed this curriculum to help rural third-world pastors, some of them with little or no training except for a few Bible classes, deal with leadership issues in the church.

I co-led a workshop with Debra last year in Bolivia, but there were some misunderstandings between us and the church and there were only a handful of people in attendance and we only had a fraction of the time normally allotted. For me to teach the whole thing, by myself, for the first time — well, that’s intimidating. Of course, I’m really just reading from the curriculum that Debra and Gail have developed over the years, but it’s still … intimidating.

Did I mention I’m intimidated? And that I’m supposed to be presenting leadership principles?

God has always gotten me through these trips, and he’s going to have to get me through this one, because I sure can’t do it on my own.

Fund-raising, by the way, is going swimmingly. Since my last post, $350 more has come in, putting me right about the $1,300 mark. This is the most I’ve ever brought in in a single week — I was at zero this time last week. Maybe God is trying to reassure me that he’s in control.