CoCo comes to town tomorrow. I’m thinking I may invite one of the committee members to be a guest blogger for the next few days, so that you can hear someone other than me blabber on.

Last week I told you what CoCo actually does. Today, though, I thought you might enjoy a sort of “behind the scenes” look at what goes into preparing for a CoCo meeting. Although it mostly involves a lot of e-mail, you might learn a few fascinating factoids about how our office works.

The journey to a CoCo meeting starts about a year in advance, when CoCo decides the date for the following year’s meeting. The fall meeting normally takes place in September or October, the spring in January or February. A while back we even met on Valentine’s Day, which members of that year’s committee may remember for a series of phone calls and Lucy’s rice trauma….

Usually we like to secure one of two conference sites—Kavanaugh’s Conference and Retreat Center, out in Crestwood, Kentucky, or Cedar Ridge Camp, somewhere between Louisville and Taylorsville. While Cedar Ridge is a Presbyterian facility, Kavanaugh’s is close to the Crestwood IGA grocery store that sells the best generic cold medication I’ve ever taken. Sacha Maxim and I will both vouch for its ability to bring you from a state of the living dead back to contributing member of society. I keep an extra box on hand at home. Maybe that’s why our winter meeting is always at Kavanaugh’s.

We then let the meeting sit until about a month before the date. At that time, if we’re talking about the fall meeting, the Nominating Committee (comprised of the outgoing class of CoCo) selects their replacements in the group. Those women, along with the returning members of the committee, all start making their flight arrangements at that time.

In the weeks before the meeting, Brianne and I wile away the hours writing and collecting reports from different liaisons and task forces, planning the educational activity for the group, and designing our own worship services (although there’s no set rule that staff have to lead some of the two daily CoCo worships, we always do).

As the days get closer, you see us spending more time around the copy machine. The pile of stuff going to the meeting grows in my office corner. This pile not only contains art supplies and charts explaining Presbyterian polity, but also our linens. Yes, that’s right, CoCo has its own set of linens that we take to our meetings. A few years back, our ever-frugal staffer Gusti Newquist went out to Goodwill and bought mass quantities of washcloths, towels, pillows, blankets, and bedsheets for our meetings, so that we didn’t need to rent linens from the retreat center. Let me just say that I’m glad I live in Louisville and can bring my own linens to the meetings—I think the linens are kind of sketchy, personally, even though I’ve washed them myself after the last two meetings. They also bear all sorts of ugly prints that throw you right back into the 1970s.

Tomorrow is the big day, though. At about 9 am, I’ll head to the grocery store and buy all our food for the meeting. While we do eat out for lunch and dinner here in town on Friday, most of the time CoCo cooks for itself. On the menu this weekend? Spaghetti, and my very own Cincinnati Chili (the real reason people want to join CoCo, of course). At 10:30 I’ll drop all the supplies off at Cedar Ridge and head straight to Louisville’s airport, where I’ll pick up the first arrival. In fact, Brianne and I will spend all afternoon shuttling our passengers back and forth from the airport. By the time I start my PC(USA) 101 lecture at 5:45 pm, it will already have been a long day… and the meeting is just beginning.

So keep us all in your thoughts and prayers this weekend as we make important decisions for the Network. I’ll look forward to reporting back to you next week!

“Cast your burden on the Lord, and God will sustain you; God will never permit the righteous to be moved.” --Psalm 55:22

Kelsey

I can vouch for Kelsey's Cincinnati Chili. I lived in Cincinnati for a year, and hers is the only version of it I can stomach.