Hilty Happenings

Here's what's been happening this last week (I know, what a boring opening line). I promise this post won't put you to sleep.

1. Josh's family visiting. My family—Dad, Dan and Jessi with Olivia and Zeeke, Andrew and Nate—came late Friday night and stayed until Sunday afternoon. We had a good time seeing the Dells and Devil's Lake State Park. Jamie cooked an amazing meal (homemade mac 'n' cheese, white chicken chili, corn, Josh's favorite broccoli-olive salad, a pumpkin roll, and dump cake with ice cream)! And we watched Ohio State beat Michigan...go Bucks!

2. Meeting some Mormons. Jamie and I met with two Mormon girls our age last week for a second time. We had the chance to share with them about salvation through faith alone. They are coming to our house tomorrow night for dinner, and expressed an interest in learning about John Wesley/Wesleyan theology. Pray for them and us.

3. Preparing to paint. The painter, whose wife just got saved, is busy now but will work on our entire basement soon. His name is Rick, and he's seen the need for updating the church building and wants to help. He doesn't understand why his wife has accepted Christ, though he's not completely opposed to the gospel. We all watched "The DaVinci Code" last night. Pray for us as we try to work through misconceptions about the movie with them. Praise God we will have the basement of the church painted for free!

4. Church health surveys. Our church will be taking church health surveys put out by New Church Specialities soon. We will rate ourselves on eight different areas described in Christian A. Schwarz's book Natural Church Development. I recommend the book to any pastor wanting to improve the overall health of the church. This will be one of the first steps involved in getting to be a healthier church.

5. Going home. We get to see Jamie's family this week as we go to Warsaw late Wednesday. We'll be there from then until early Saturday morning. Hopefully we'll get to see some Janofski's from Marion too (Craig and Renee? Ken and Tina?). Let us know if you can get together.

Hope you all have a great turkey day!