Zooming around...

I have been using the Zoom meeting app for about two years already for various different meetings, but during Covid-19 everyone seemed to discover its usefulness and ability to be a platform for keeping in touch with one another when we were social distancing. I have spent soooo much time on zoom in the last two months! 

Here are some of the groups which I used to meet with regularly before Covid-19. Firstly with the guys from YWAM in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia - we meet once a month to pray together, and we met more frequently during covid-19, love these guys:

Then with the leadership team or Area Circle Team (ACT) for YWAM in Central Europe: we meet every other month or so. I also meet regularly with our "Core team" of four of us (not pictured).

Another (temporary) group has been since September as I have been involved with FOCOS coaching training which is online every month and then we had the one week intensive which was held in Budapest in January.  It has been fun to see the interaction online after the intensive as we are much more connected than before we met in person!

Another group which met before, but during Covid met more frequently is the YWAM Field Circle Team for all of Europe. As I am one of the core leaders in my Area, I am part of this group as well. It is such a privilege to be a part of this amazing group of leaders. 

I also joined the Editorial team for an initiative called the European Leaders Learning Community which we are starting up officially in September. In the meantime we have been running Facebook Live interviews with various leaders in our organisation in what we call the "leadership lounge-lockdown edition". It has been such fun working with a team of great people to put all this together... 

And yes, you guessed, we met each week on zoom to do so!

Then, we as a YWAM Central European Area decided to meet altogether on zoom. We had never done it before, but we had an amazing time together - We had about 200 people joining on 100 unique connections representing 13 of the 16 nations in Central Europe. You can read more on the ywamce.com/blog 

In order to make this meeting go smoothly we treated like an "event" and had a team to coordinate it - Great bunch of people!:

In the two hours we had many elements: A talk that I did on pruning/sabbatical: Click below to watch it :)

Two times of worship - one on the zoom meeting at the beginning, and one on Facebook live to end off with.  We shared together in small groups for some of it and also had some feedback and sharing from the audience. We saw that it was such a good thing that we believe that we will do it again in September!!

Another exciting element of zoom is the ability to run courses online for people around the world. In May, YWAM Craiova planned to have a 3 week Pioneering and Leadership course - but in the end because of corona, instead of cancelling completely, they decided to take it online. So instead of the 25-30 people who would have joined in, they had over 100 people from all over the world - I was in breakout groups with people from Brazil and Bangladesh! And over 60 of those finished the assignment that went with the course to get the credits from YWAM's University of the Nations.

I enjoyed taking part in the course and learning along with many other people. And the breakout groups were a great way to meet people (or reconnect with those we knew already) along with learning from each other. 

Another use of zoom in this time was to connect with my family who are in 4 different countries - it was so great to connect with them all a couple of times... and I hope this is something we will continue in the future now that we have discovered how easy and fun it is! (this photo was taken at Easter - please note that my Mom is sitting with the Easter bunny with a mask on... what can I say?)

And then I did try to Zoom with some of my local friends, but in the end they couldn't get on, so we just did Messenger Chat which turned out to be much more fun... but would be very distracting for meetings!!

Beside all of these things, I also did sessions with 3 coaching "clients" on zoom - all to get the hours I need for the coaching course I am finishing up. Including two other local clients, I have now already done 25 sessions out of the needed 30, and so will finish up in  a couple of weeks already! I don't have any pictures of those sessions as they are all confidential :)

But I have to say that I am really enjoying doing the coaching... much more than I thought I would. I am also so glad that I decided to go ahead and get as much done while we were in lockdown as now I can relax a bit! And looking back, I don't know how I would have been able to meet the September deadline for finishing up the coaching hours without all the extra "corona time", so I am glad for the virus for that at least!

As you can see, I have definitely been zooming all over Europe and around the world over these last two and a bit months of "lockdown" - all while staying in the comfort of my own home!