Thursday, January 31, 2008

Heroes

We were doing so good! We have been committed to spending time together, to doing our homework, to reading, to playing on the computer...then we found The Office. And even though we really enjoy the show, we are able to limit ourselves with the dvd set of the whole season by just watching one every now and then.

Then my neighbor let me borrow season one of Heroes. We got sucked in like two suckers! Now I remember why we try not to watch TV. I guess we are only human...

At least we don't have to deal with commercials. This definitely is the way to watch your shows...if you tend to be a season or two behind regular programming. Okay, never mind, we're weird.

I better go get something productive done tonight.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Yup, yup, the school semester has started. And we already have homework. This weekend we started up the old routine of sitting on the couch with textbook or notebook in hand. While this should be a somewhat easier semester than most (thankfully!) it is still a school semester.

On the bright side, Joshua and I have started a Perspectives Course on Sunday nights. This is put on by the US Center for World Mission and is basically about the world Christian movement. We learn about what God is doing around the world, what His plan has been since the beginning, and what our part in the big story can be. We've only had 2 nights so far, but we love it! We love learning about other cultures and learning about the Bible, so this should be a good combination for us. Last night we were taught "The Story of His Glory," which was a really cool explanation, in story form, of the Bible, expressing God's work and plan from the beginning to the promised end. Wow, talk about exciting! We have met other people who are interested in missions and other people who are just wanting to learn more about God's work. And we love meeting new people with common interests.
If you want to know more about Perspectives go to: www.perspectives.org

Okay, I'm going to get to work on something...
Have a great day!

Monday, January 14, 2008

Disciple Now!

Our friend Clayton is still a youth pastor down in Cleburne and he asked us to be leaders at their Disciple Now youth retreat again this year. We got seniors again, which was great. One thing that's nice about seniors is that they like to go to sleep before 3am. So we got a reasonable amount of sleep for a retreat weekend. Really, we had a great time. We had 4 guys and 1 girl, so it was pretty low-key. Saturday night, though, we wrapped Clayton's truck in saran wrap - 4 rolls. It was great! Here is our good-looking group in our matching hoodies. We were posing by Clayton's truck, but you can't really see it.

So now it's back to work and the beginning of the last semester...

And we're back!

My apologies to anyone who checks this regularly. This Christmas break has flown by! I'll try to cover all the good stuff in a few posts and add pictures wherever possible.

Bustamante was great! We had a wonderful team who went on the trip and had an incredible time there. The church we are working with there had planned a kids Christmas party for that Saturday and we got to help with songs and games. Over 70 kids were there.
We had taken 200 shoebox Christmas gifts for the church to give to kids in the area and we got to wrap them and pass them out to the kids who came to the party. We didn't know that we would get the opportunity to give the gifts to the kids, so that was a great surprise to be a part of that.

Here are some of the wrapped gifts in the church. We spent about an hour in the morning wrapping the boxes. We had quite the assembly line going!






Here are the kids sitting waiting for their food. The church had made a different version of chilly-dogs for the kids.




We got back safely with no problems on Sunday. Then Joshua and I finished packing for Colorado and got on a plane early the next morning, Christmas Eve, and flew to Denver to be with my family. We had a white Christmas! In fact, it snowed all day on Christmas! That was a treat for us Texans! We had a wonderful, Superman Christmas! We have a tradition for Christmas where we all get something that matches - funny hats, nice sweaters, shirts, etc - and this year was Superman and Supergirl.




So, even though we had a crazy traveling schedule, we enjoyed being able to do everything we got to do. We love being able to be a part of what God is doing all over the world. It was a quick and somewhat exhausting trip, but there is nothing to compare to being used by God to do His work. And then to be able to be with family is a blessing we do not take for granted.

Merry (late) Christmas!