Monday, March 26

Paradigm Mission Trip

Brookhaven's youth group is coming. What an exciting week that will be! They plan to be here for a week in late-July/early-August. Boy do we have work for them!

We're hoping to do a mini-VBS and have them help with whatever remodeling is happening at the time. This is another prayer request for us. Pray that logistics will all work out for each person who needs to come. Pray that God would prepare the team for what may not seem like a "mission trip." Pray for the team as they raise funds to come. And pray for God to use them when they're here.

Thank you so much for your prayers!

Friday, March 23

Life in March

We're alive! See subtitle of our blog if you're wondering why we haven't updated lately. Okay, really we've just been busy and are slacking. So this post might be a little longer than normal.

The snow is definitely gone. We're loving the early spring weather and we're excited to take advantage of the state park. We just need to purchase the year pass. We're also going to become members of a fitness center that's just a few blocks from our house. Jamie's been there once and loved it. With our health insurance we save 20% off the normal rate and they pay you to work out (kind of like IWU does). One of the ladies at our church works out there, so we'll be able to spend time with her and hopefully meet some new people too.

Maddie, our cat, is at least three times as big as when we got her. The vet says she'll always be a little on the small side though. We can't wait to get her de-clawed. What a menace! If she's not clawing up the furniture, it's the curtains. If she's not jumping on the kitchen table, she's trying to climb our picture window (with a good amount of success). Her favorite activity is to lay on our couch staring out the picture window. She'll fall asleep there for hours on end.

Enough about the cat....

We're are also volunteering at the local kindergarten a couple days a week. It's been fun meeting kids and getting to know the teachers we help out. Hopefully we'll be able to someday meet their parents as well.

Other big news (no, we're not expecting) is that we're looking into remodeling/updating the church building this summer. Jamie now works part-time for a construction company in town. She shoots nail guns and is learning to roof houses. I wonder how many of you I had going there?

She really does work for the construction company, just as their financial guru. She keeps the checkbooks in order and has been getting things ready for tax time. All this to say her boss is DeLon Davis, an IWU grad! He and his family had been attending our church back in the early 90s but stopped because they were immediately asked to volunteer for every ministry position possible. Now we're at least hoping they can help us figure out what can and can't be done to improve the building. Please pray we'll have wisdom to know how much we can spend, what's essential and what's not, etc.

Hope life back in Indiana (or wherever you're reading from) is going well.