Mixing Work and Play

Thank you for your prayers – we are currently at 72% of our monthly goal to get to NYC! We are so thankful for those who are giving, meeting with us, have been giving, are praying, are giving us contacts, so forth and so on.

To be honest, this has been a weird season for us. After 8.5 years of not having worked on ministry partner development (support-raising) full-time, it has definitely been a transition getting used to the ebbs and flows. For instance, we by no means have consistent hours, I have found myself working way more than I normally do (and I worked a lot for a staff mom to begin with!), our kids sometimes join us on appointments but are sometimes left with one person or another while we head off, some days we have 4 appointments and some days we have 1, one of us, or both of us, is almost always working during the evening “crazy” hours between dinner and bed, we haven’t been able to really live life with our friends and church family because our schedule is so crazy and planning is almost impossible, etc..

Don’t get me wrong – we love what we are doing now and there is nothing more rewarding than inviting people to join in on what God wants to do in NYC. To see people catch the vision and get behind us prayerfully and financially is such a cool thing. We are so grateful that we get to do ministry even now as we meet people, pray with them and for them, and challenge them to worship God through their giving. But for all the love we have for it and as rewarding as it has been to see God move, it has been hard, challenging, tiring, and weird.

That being said, we are learning – to breathe when we get a chance, to live life with our kids in between appointments, and to look ahead with expectancy but enjoy the here and now. Part of that has been asking the kids to put together a list of what they want to do before we leave NC and head north. A few things on the list – go bowling, go roller skating, visit the Splash Pad, go to Pullen Park, go to the park with friends, go to the farm pool (some people in our church have a really cool pool at their farm), go to Marbles Kids Museum in Raleigh, and paint pottery at Crazy Glaze studio.

We are taking advantage of any lulls in our schedule to mark things off the list – so far, we have rode the train and played at Pullen Park, we went bowling, we went to the Splash Pad with friends, and we went to the movies to see “Finding Dory”. Of course, I didn’t take hardly any pictures – so enjoy the only two I got. I have to get better at this!

Little man at the Splash Pad – he absolutely loved it – even if it was freezing! He just laughed and laughed at the water being sprayed. Speaking of, he also got his first hair cut…had to get rid of the rat tail he had going on in the back. He wasn’t a big fan of it and kept trying to push the hair stylist’s hand down. The pictures are before, during, and after.