Wow. I've been hard-core neglecting this blog, so I apologize. But now that my life is finally starting to fall back into place, I want to share a bit about what I've been up to over the last month. It's been a wild ride.
So first off, we're into our new house! We spent our first night there on September 28th. My brother helped Eric move our bed over and drop the trailer full of our stuff in the driveway that night. Then on that Saturday we had some friends and family come and help us move all of our furniture. It was so nice to have all of that help; everything went really smoothly! For the most part, things are put away and organized, although there are still some things that we're figuring out what to do with yet. I don't dare take any pictures yet, because I don't want to document the clutter! So that's my project for the week: to get organized so that I can post some pics. Maybe even a video tour for Shelly & Steph :)
At work I've been crazy busy making plans for our annual County Wide Food Drive. That happened this past Saturday, and I feel like I can finally breathe again. Basically in one day, we go door-to-door in the greater GR area and collect food donations to stock up our pantries! It's usually about 85 tons of food, with the help of over 1,000 volunteers.
So it's an undertaking, that's for sure! Especially this year, I lost a couple of key volunteers who've done a lot of work in the past, and I wasn't able to replace them. So I ended up doing a lot of extra work with that. But Saturday was beautiful and even though we didn't collect nearly as much food as we had hoped to, it was a great experience for those who participated. And, we ended up with a whole load of food that we didn't have when we started.
Youth group is also underway for the year! We've had a couple of small group meetings already, and they've been fun thus far, but it's been tough to get our kids to talk about what really matters to them. This year Eric and I, as well as the other leaders, really want to push our kids to dig deeper into their faith. Most of the high schoolers from our church go to a Christian school, so they've become inundated with "faith" and "religion." By the time they get to youth group God is the last thing they want to talk about, so they don't. We broke into small groups last night in our large group gathering, so we had kids from all different grades, but I swear it was like pulling teeth trying to get them to talk.
Our adult small group that we're a part of has also been struggling with some of this stuff together. Why don't we talk about our faith within the church? It's become such a personal thing, so private, and the Bible clearly states that we need to mutually encourage one another along the faith journey. It's meant to be done together! But we all have this front to put up, this idea that we need to look like we've got it all together, that we can't honestly share together what's on our hearts. So we're working on it. And I'm really excited about it.
Anyway, that's the short version. I know I'm going to talk more about youth group and our small group, because this stuff has been on my heart a lot lately. And, I promise to post house pictures soon. Thanks for reading :)
