Long time, no hear from...

Sorry it's been so long. Life her is crazy. We re living a rather frantic life. Mondays are my day off so I actually have time to write to all of you.

Hopefully the mortgage stuff is all going on as planned. I just re-faxed some paperwork over to the company so that should be the last of it. Now we just have to wait for the appraisal and the closing date to be set.

Otherwise life has been interesting. I had a looooooooong weekend. It started at 8:30 am Saturday with a 4 hour Leadership conference at the church. After that, I went home and spent time preparing for my sermon. They, at 4:45, I was back at the church to get mic'd up for the ermon and to talk over some logistics. At 5:28, the service began and I gave my message. The service ended around 6:30 (the Sat. pm crowd is in-and-out) after which I grabbed some food with Mary then went home and was just having a bad night. (During my sermon, I was trying too hard to focus on my sermon notes and couldn't "get into it.") Mary gave me some encouragement and pointers and then I want to bed.

Sunday morning I was back at the church at 7:15 (a bit early) and as I was searching for a cassock that fit, I realized that I had made the classic "husband trying not to wake up the wife so he gets dressed in the dark" blunder of wearing the wrong shoes (brown instead of black). So I raced home (at 30 mph) and changed. I get back to the church and spoke with Father Owens (the rector here and "celebrant" at the services) about the liturgy and choreography of the morning's services. The first service started at 8:00 and my sermon was a little looser (in a good way). After the 8:00 service was a time to hang out in the parrish hall (think fellowship hall).

The second service started at 10:00 and the sermon was the best of the weekend. It was nice to actually feel like I was free to preach, not just trying to read my notes. (This was also true at the 8:00 service. I pretty much just had the scripture in front of me upon which I expounded [you're welcome collective grammar police persons]). The energy of the congregants was much better during the 10 am service so I fed off of it and presented a much more interesting and energetic sermon.

After that Mary and I grabbed lunch and I went home and napped for over 2 hours to recover. Immediately after I got up, we went to the Buckwalter Campus to prepare for Youth Group. I don't have enough time to share too much about youth group, but suffice it to say that it was the first time since Ive been here that everyone on the worship team could sing/play adequately and the first time we had a drummer which pretty much made worship, and therefore youth group extraordinarily special.

As an indication of how crazy our life has been, there are 182 transactions in the last 60 days our our checking account alone. With the credit cards and savings, it must be more like 250. Also, today I took all the garbage we've created since we moved here (6 weeks ago) to the dump for the first time. (Apparently, you don't have to pay for trash pick up if you want to do it yourself.) Eventually we will move in to our house (probably mid March) and settle down in every way. Until then we will be living a crazy, exciting and deeply fulfilling life of ministry and marriage.

We love you all very much. Sorry for the 10 days with no posting. even our days off aren't truly "sabaths" so we are working hard to rest. God bless you all! Come visit some time after we move into our house (bring your paintbrush).

Danny