What a week!

This past week was a blur for me… let me see if I can catch you all up. The Christmas Eve service was awesome! We set up a stage in the barn made out of these huge wooden tables, and hooked up our stage lights in the old hayloft area of the barn to shine down on the stage. Our media guy, Ed Niles figured out how to mount our projectors so that we could have duel screens above the stage, and it looked really cool! Our attendance was a little down from last year, but I think it was because we didn’t send out a mass mailer like we had the previous to years…lesson learned there.

Erin and I got back from cleaning up and everything at about 11:30. It was as this point that we began wrapping our Christmas presents. Needless to say, it became a late night. We went to bed sometime between 3 and 4. Fortunately, our daughters are not old enough yet to wake up at the crack of dawn. They got going around 9:00 and the Christmas morning blitz was on! I love Christmas! We had a great time together.

After a full day of Christmas festivities, Erin and I and our girls headed about 2 ½ hrs south to arrive in Aiken SC, at about 11:30pm where my grandparents live. We met my cousins Jacob and Seth there who are both in Florida now, so seeing them was something we don’t get to do very often. My grandparents own about 30 acres with horses and pastures and stuff. On the property, there is a couple who lives in a small house there, pays rent, with the perks of being able to stable their horses as well. For Grandpa, it means that there is someone around to feed horses when he chooses to travel. My cousins and I were out playing football with our wives in the back yard and we freaked this lady out who lives on the property. She was most definitely did not have the right amount of holiday spirit. She was flat out rude and mean to us – and we didn’t even break, burn, or destroy a single thing. The funny thing is, Jacob and I are newly ordained Pastors and this was our moment to shine right? We did the best we could, but she was very upset, and we were very much in the right on this one. Fortunately, Jake and I both kept our cool, which was good because we both have the tendency to become hot headed in situations like this. Eventually, we just went inside to get away from her peering between the blinds at us. Some people are just extremely easy to bother.

Erin and I drove home on the 26th and got in around 10:30 pm. Thursday morning; I packed my bags, went in to work for about 2 hrs, then headed for White Oak Conference Center with two of our students for EXTREME LEADERSHIP training. Josh and Thor had a great time. We had some sweet rock climbing walls, a GPS aided treasure hunt, some awesome breakout sessions, excellent speakers, and a rockin band. Seeing now how long the blog entry has become, I will just say that we had a great time, and the guys learned incredibly valuable tools that I have no doubt will have an influence on our student ministry, 2T2 in 2008.

We returned at 2:30 Saturday afternoon, I hung out with Erin until the girls woke up from their nap at 4:00, and we both went over to the office for a couple hours (on our Anniversary) to get things finalized for Sunday morning. Pastor Tommy would be out, so that meant most all of Sunday’s responsibility fell on me. 6:15 Sunday morning Erin and I get up, get our girls, and 900 different laptops, projectors, and video cameras together and head out for church at 8:00. I pick up the church van and we started setting up at 8:30. Sunday’s service went well. Numbers were down because it was right after Christmas, but the mood and spirit of the church was very positive. But I admit, I was very relieved that I had cancelled 2T2 meeting for this week, because it gave me a chance to relax, my parents came over to watch the girls and I got to take Erin out to one of our favorite restaurants (The Outback Steakhouse baby!) and enjoy some time alone together. What a week!