Entertaining Weekend

It was not a "deep breath" weekend.

But that's okay. It was filled with friends and fellowship instead! We had friends from church, plus friends who were only in town for a track meet, over for hamburgers on Friday night. It was wonderful to laugh together, and I was intrigued to hear an insider's view on the forthcoming new Anglican province for conservatives in North America.

Saturday we served chili to a family of seven that we are becoming friends with (and enjoyed yummy salad and homemade bread that they brought). He is a pastor in a nearby town, they homeschool, they are not Anglicans, they have a wide age span with their kids just like we do, and they'd been praying for another family like that to be friends with. There's also a unique pastoral need that they know more about than we do, having been in that "pastor's family" role longer, but it is to have Christian friends who aren't in your church to discuss the challenges of ministry with. Did I mention that our kids all hit it off the first time we got together? God is so good.

We've been watching the videos from the Do Hard Things conference with them--a conference for teens, by teens. Two homeschooled brothers started the whole thing with a blog called The Rebelution. Their idea was simple: Reject the current cultural idea that the teenage years are a time of immaturity that may last even past the college years; rise above those low expectations to do hard things for God and your fellow man. It's a challenging message for adults as well as teens--Papa Rooster loved the book as much as our three teens did. Our new friends are thinking they'd like to show the DVDs to their youth group, and we'd certainly consider doing that too, if we had one. (Actually, we do--our three teenagers. So I guess we've just done that!)

On Sunday we had a delightful couple visit our church and join us for lunch. We had never met the young man, but we remember babysitting the young lady when she was three years old! She was the daughter of one of our professors, and he and his wife did our premarital counseling, since we were engaged and in college. And she is now expecting a child of her own. It makes one feel very old.

But the cool thing is that we reconnected through the AMIA/Anglican community (initially through this blog, in fact!). Her parents were always hard-core non-denom/Bible church people, so it was quite amazing to receive an email from her describing her and her husband's journey into Anglicanism, which included a recent move to Wisconsin, to an orthodox Anglican seminary a little over an hour away. We hope to see more of them in the next year that they're there. The young man has already offered to preach some Sunday and give Papa Rooster a Saturday off.

Speaking of which, you should see what we got done last Saturday! I have to snap a few "after" pictures and I will post about it this week. We were so grateful to our friends Stephen and Barbara who made the trek to visit us last weekend--we had a wonderful time with them for lunch--as well as for Stephen's excellent message, and the time it afforded us to knock a big project off our list!

Well, that was the last two weekends...time to get started on my week!