A Stone's Throw

Jenny woke me up at the crack of dawn this morning saying there was a “critter” somewhere in the house. She heard a paper fall off of the dresser. Then she felt something on her hip as she laid in bed!! Creepy! I looked around the kitchen. Didn’t find anything. Looked in Taylor’s room . . . nothing thank goodness. He would have totally been freaked out for who knows how long! Working my way back into the bedroom, I walked into our bathroom. On a decoration in the window is the silhouette of a tiny bird. Then it flies right toward me!! Totally freaked out, I am screaming like a little girl! (Shut up Fran!! I don’t want to hear it!!) Poor thing didn’t know what in the world was going on. Kept trying to fly to safety and hitting the window and mirrors in the bathroom. Jenny is in the far other end of the house by now. I go out in the garage to find something to capture the thing with. What to use? How about a trout net? Perfect! After about 10 minutes of flying around tiring the sucker out, he/she landed in our shower and sat on the floor. I put the net over the top of it and slipped a cardboard box top under it and headed for the front door. Put it on the sidewalk and it didn’t move a bit . . . just sat there stunned. Sat there long enough for me to get a good picture. And they lived happily ever after. Let’s not talk about where the thing used the bathroom in our bathroom!! Disgusting!!

Caleb Towe, one of our CFC grads from Nixa, works down at Silver Dollar City and we have been trying to get down to see him all year. If you all know, I am a big fan of the Silver Dollar City! We have season tickets each year as a Christmas gift from my mom and dad, so we go a lot. We haven’t been down there this year and I’ve been wanting to go all year, so I decided to beg off of work early on Monday to the city.

Caleb is an actor on the the Silver Dollar Line. They rotate the duties of Alfie and Ralphie J. Bolland, “those notorious train robbers” and the conductor of the train. He happened to be the Conductor on Monday afternoon. If you have been to SDC and been as many times as I have growing up, you probably know the scripts by heart. They have changed some of the things, which is cool. He even added a “David Stone” on the ride for good measure . . . nice!

Good to get away for the afternoon. We will go again, especially when he is “robbing.”

Ben Arment has a great post about some similar feeling I am having right now. We are at a definite “crisis of belief” stage in the life of our church family. The finances are in a word, bad. We also have a hard time getting volunteers for the ministries we are offering. There are a lot of churches in the same situation as ours, a lot of them. We are in good company. It is just that some of them have buildings and assets that they are able to lean against during the storms. Church plants don’t have that luxury. I was encouraged by Ben’s post about this temporary “dip” (more about this in a later post) is simply preparation for a huge breakthrough in our church. Here is his conclusion on the matter:

Whenever I sense tension in our church, I’ve come to get excited about what God has in store… what he’s got brewing. Because he always works it for good. It took me a while to learn not to hyperventilate and panic from the uncontrollable change, the loss of people, whatever. But amid all the crises we’ve experienced, God has built our church stronger and stronger every year.

I’m excited about what God is going to do here in the next few days with His People. God, help us to become men and women of faith that will follow Your Calling to the ends of the earth.