If you’ve been to a convention before, you may feel like you know what to expect. There’s the big city life, tons of Mennonites, so many familiar faces and those faces you see on the street. There’s always amazing speakers, great friends, crazy sponsors and lots of encounters. So many things you know to expect and so many experiences to come. But there’s also the unexpected in every situation, God’s way of keeping us on our toes. I recently had an unexpected encounter of my own that I would like to share.

Robert Alison lives under the bridge by the Red Roof Inn. I don’t know his age and I don’t know his life story, but I do know he said he was in prison for 13 years and just got out a week ago. He is an ordained minister and I believea great speaker and follower of Christ. You may wonder how I know these things about a homeless man that sleeps near my hotel. Well, I got to know Robert all because Matt Lehman and I simply said, “Hi.”

Booths at the exhibit hall had just closed around 11 on Wednesday night, and Matt and I were walking back to our hotel from the convention center. We decided to cross the street before the bridge, without really thinking much about it. Our decision ran us under the bridge and took us past a homeless man with flowers (Robert).

We had been talking but looked up and simply smiled and said “Hi” to a skinny, scruffy-bearded, flower-bearing man in a coat. He turned and said, “You know, you are the first ones to say hi to me.” At this point we turned and stood there as he closed the gap between us. He held out his hand and told us his name was Robert Alison.

“I just see the fire of God in you,” he said. “You just glow. Your smiles just glow.”

We stood there in awe for the next 15 minutes as Robert shared God with us. He shared what the prophets had told him and how he wants to get back into speaking and preaching.

“When you got Jesus in the front and God in the back and a legion of angels surrounding you, nothing can touch you,” he said.

As he went on about the greatness of God, Matt and I stood there, listening intently, and smiling and laughing along.

“Every night, when you go to sleep, God puts fire in you,” he said. “Every morning when you wake up, God puts fire in you!”

By this point Robert could not keep still; he was just too excited about God and the work He was doing.

When I told my good friend, Kate Mast, about my encounter, she said, “And we always think we need to preach to the homeless. We always think about us giving to the poor but never expect that they can give us a blessing.”

Robert was a blessing. The actions of Christians everywhere speak so loud. Let the fire relight and burn bright.

“How on earth am I supposed to sell 900 handwoven Peruvian bracelets?”

This is a question I have been struggling with for the past two months, when I received a delivery consisting of 700 bracelets from the Peru Spring 2009 Goshen College SST group. “I still have 200 from my last batch!” I thought, nearly appalled.

The spring of 2008 I went to Chimbote, Peru, on the service portion of Goshen College’s Study-Service Term (SST). Chimbote, a coastal city, and the poorest city in Peru, was full of dust, stray dogs, crying children on the streets, houses made out of reeds, prostitutes, disease, illness, crime, waste and an overall stench of poverty. Going on service I knew I wanted to work with young women.

Very long story short (and if you would like to hear the long story, you’re more then welcome to put your e-mail address below and I will send you a copy of the story), I ended up creating a young women’s group for ages 12-18, in an attempt to provide the girls with something to do to keep them off the streets and away from the drugs, alcohol and prostitution.

While participating with this group of women, I also found myself meeting with a group of older women, ages 20-50, who met in the afternoons to make crafts, including traditional handwoven Peruvian bracelets. Eventually, Benjamin, my main contact in Chimbote, and I had the idea to have the older women teach the younger women how to make the bracelets so they could sell them and make a profit. This idea later spread to a group of women prostitutes who also wanted to participate in the bracelet-making program.

Benjamin and I worked out a way that I could sell the bracelets in the States and return the money by wiring it to a bank account. Within the first week of returning to the States I sold the 200 bracelets I originally brought home, which raised about $700. I received more bracelets, about 300, later that summer. I proceeded to sell these at music festivals, the Goshen farmer’s market and student art shows, which raised a little over $1,000. As of this date, I have sent approximately $3,000 to Peru with the profits from the bracelets.

Coming to Convention 2009, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew I was an mPress staff member. I assumed I would be covering stories on worship services, long lunch lines and anxious Mennonite teenagers — articles that weren’t exactly my “passions.”

I was hoping I could have an opportunity to sell some of my 900 bracelets, but without any kind of market or booth, I didn’t know how this would be possible.  Also, mPress is hard work (if you can’t tell by all our fabulous articles!) and I didn’t know if I would have a free moment to take a break with my bracelets.

Although I brought my bracelets, they sat in my hotel room untouched. But then Wednesday I saw there was an opportunity to write an article about the Mennonite Women USA booth. I jumped at the chance, seeing that this was something that interested me and I could be really passionate about writing.

Engaging in this article was a fabulous experience, not only because I had the chance to see what Mennonite Women USA was about and what they were currently doing for the church, but also because it reminded me of my passion and my mission to sell the Peruvian women’s bracelets! I saw that Mennonite Women’s next Timbrel issue was going to be about “Women and Poverty.” As I’m attempting to alleviate Peruvian women from poverty, this fell right in line with my prerogative.

I sat down to write this article, hoping to stir up some interest about my bracelets. Also, looking through the convention program, I noted Michelle Hershberger’s seminar titled, “How a prostitute can be more righteous than a patriarch: Understanding biblical stories in their context.” I plan to attend this seminar today (Thursday at 1:45 p.m., Friday at 3:00 p.m., in case you’re interested, too) and write an mPress article about it. Hopefully I will have the opportunity to sell some of my Peruvian bracelets there too.

Overall, I’m quite excited that Convention 2009 has fallen directly in line with my passions. For some reason, before coming to Columbus I could not see the connection between my bracelets and the overall convention. I thought it would be challenging to find the opportunity to sell my bracelets, and to tell the story to those who were interested. Now I can see that the articles I’m writing for mPress directly align with my passion to aid Peruvian women prostitutes.

A recent cartoon in The New Yorker shows a woman standing by a table with scissors in hand. A newspaper is spread out before her with rectangular holes here and there, and she’s taking the scissors to the paper yet again. She pauses briefly to explain things to her husband, who looks perplexed there with coffee cup in hand: “I’m cutting articles out of the newspaper while we still can.”

The cartoon is funny and sad to those of us who believe that newspapers belong on a continuum with air, water and bread. These are not easy times for a paper, even one that tries to publish all the news that’s fit to print. Over the years people came to expect free news and information on the Internet, no matter how expensive gathering it may be. Then came the double whammy of an economic meltdown and an advertising recession.

It’s no wonder that the Newspaper Association of America has been running ads in our local paper, The Goshen News, in effect reminding people that newspapers are still in business. The association noted that 104 million adults read a print newspaper every day; that’s more than watch the Super Bowl (94 million) or “American Idol” (23 million). The ad goes on: “Newspapers are reinventing themselves themselves to focus on serving distinct audiences . . . across media channels.”

The transformation of the news business, as painful as it may be in some quarters (like Denver, where The Rocky Mountain News shut down this spring), is forcing some very positive changes in journalism. Two that quickly come to mind are transparency and interactivity. Editors and reporters have emerged from behind walls, engaging readers with blogs, tweets, Q&A exchanges, ombudsman columns.

And newspapers are arguably offering better coverage than ever because readers once consigned to armchairs are contributing to the published product. One of my favorite sections is now the listing of the “most popular” e-mailed articles. Readers regularly share their work in photo galleries; they enrich (and correct) articles with easier access to news desks.

As we gather here in Columbus, we’re hoping that mPress will become one of the meaningful “side” spaces at the convention. To make that happen, we need your contributions. If you have an idea for an article or see a photo opportunity, please let us know. Though we don’t print letters in the limited space of our eight-page print edition, we welcome your comments online.

With this iteration of mPress, we’ve added several new features that are dependent on audience participation. One is Bio on a Card, which you might think of as a profile in miniature. Suzanne Ehst, an academic counselor at Goshen College, invites students to share their life stories on no more than one side of an index card. The Record, the weekly newspaper on campus, generally prints one a week. We borrowed the idea, thinking it could help people to introduce themselves and learn to know neighbors at the convention. Please submit a card; we have plenty on the table in front of the mPress office. We’ll publish some of them and post all of them on the wall out front.

Through the Frugal Diner column, we invite you to share tips on inexpensive but good places to eat in town. Modeled on the Metropolitan Diary in The New York Times, our Convention Diary aims to share memorable comments and stories and scenes throughout the week. We definitely need your help in recording those moments. At the top of the home page, you’ll see Photos from the Floor. This is intended as a “best of” gallery of photos from all of you, including impromptu snapshots from a cellphone in a crowded convention floor.

So we hope to hear from you, in one form or another. And we trust you will have a good week, a very good week – that you will breathe and be filled.