Mexico Week 1 - Pictures

It's been a great week of relaxing and spending time with my family.
I just uploaded some pictures. Check them out here!

On a completely unrelated note: I've been using Linux instead of Windows since Sunday and I'm wondering why it's taken me so long to consider switching...I like it!

Perfect

Sarah and I have been in Mexico since Thursday afternoon. We were blessed to be able to spend our first 2 days at a hotel (the funny thing is that getting the 2 nights was a better deal than the ticket by itself, I like that kind of deal!). We've been at my parents' house since Saturday night. I spoke in church last night and it was a great 3 our service/Christmas program with an AMAZING potluck afterward.
Everything has been great so far and we will be spending some time at the beach today if we make it there after preparing the food for the Christmas Eve celebration tonight. Tomorrow we will more than likely stay home and play games and on New Year's day we will be at the beach with the whole church. Besides that, I'm not really sure what will be going on in the next week, I may just use the time to get a lot of reading done.
May God Bless you as you spend time with your family and friends in the next few days!

Party!

Today is the Radiate Christmas Party! I'm really looking forward to it. Then I've gotta run home and pack everything I need for the next 2 weeks into suitcases 'cause we'll be leaving for Minneapolis around 3:30 in the morning! (yay for early mornings...ok so not really, but it'll be worth it when we get there).

Christmas @ VCA

Last night was our annual Christmas Program. The children of the church did a skit about the night before Christmas that had some hilarious outfits that I unfortunately have no pictures of. There was an instrumental that everyone did very well on (Pat A Pan)...Then we followed with a skit called "Mark and Harold's Angel Swing." It was fun. And it was all wrapped up by a beautiful rendition of the song from the Prince of Egypt, "When You Believe."
On a sadder note the two fundraising concerts we were going to have today had to be postponed because of inclement weather in Chicago for Tom Netherton to travel. We're in the process of rescheduling for February.
Here is the only picture it's letting me load from last night:

Missions Addiction

I finished reading The Missions Addiction this week...Wow! I would definitely recommend that book if: you've never been on a missions trip, you have been on a missions trip or think you may someday, you feel called to the mission field, you think that you're living in a mission field OR you don't want to have anything to do with missions because it makes you think of tasks or fields because it makes you think of work...if ANY of those describe you then you should take the time to read the book! :-) I've owned it for about 5 years and I kept putting it off because I "grew up on the mission field," what's more my emphasis at Elim was in MISSIONS! Why should I need to read a book about it!?! I was wrong. It will go into my list of AWESOME books about living the Christian life.
So if you just read all that and thought to yourself that it didn't apply to you, I can put it to you another way: it deals with what it does and what it should look like to live as a Christian in the 21st century...both here and around the world. Quite an exciting book as far as content...the chapters felt a little long, but what you were getting was powerful.

Cold!

Man it's cold! It was colder than -18 this morning when I went to try to lay brick at ONE24...it was too cold for the bricks to stick because it was so cold outside!
As I type this it's -9 and should reach -10 tonight before it starts warming up for this next week...man, I sure am going to miss this cold when I'm in Mexico over Christmas :-)

College Christmas Party

Here are some pics Suanne took on Tuesday night...you've gotta love ugly Christmas outfits!