Look at Me !!

 

In that last pic, FireGirl was originally bending upside down like her daddy. That's what I was trying to take a picture of. FireMan is completely oblivious to the fact that she has just taken a header into the ground, and I snapped this pic as it happened, capturing the split second after face-plant but before screaming started.

She was fine, just scared and a little upset.

Not Just Another Blog Challenge: #4 - What's so Great about your Place of Worship

Our church is pretty awesome.

I think what I admire most about our church is how much they reach out to the community. I don't think I've ever belonged to a church that was as involved in our local community as this one.

We support a local ministry that provides food to those who are struggling, primarily homeless adult men. Members provide bags of food & toiletries on a weekly basis, that are loaded up once a month & delivered to the ministry.

Once a month the members of the church also go to the ministry's primary location and serve a hot meal, as well as providing music & a quick devotional. Still primarily homeless men, but as the economy took a downturn they started seeing more & more families.

The church is also heavily involved with an organization that provides for men recently released from prison. This group owns two houses that serves as a type of transition house as the men find their footing back in the real world. They are provided a furnished room, and must attend counselling sessions, etc. while there. The organization also helps the obtain basic job skills so they can begin working again.

In addition, our church has a jail ministry, where members of the church go to area jails several times a month to minister to the inmates, pray with them, or sometimes just listen to them. Inmates who have shown good behavior are permitted to attend local worship services, and our church provides transportation for approximately 10 inmates to attend our church every Sunday.

We also support the local pregnancy crisis center, providing counselling to pregnant women who find themselves looking for alternatives to abortion, many of them feeling they have no options, but don't know what else to do. They provide everything from basic baby supplies, parenting classes, adoption counselling, basic prenatal care, and sometimes just listening to the women's struggles.

I'm sure I'm missing some areas of community involvement, but those are definitely the big ones.

There a thousand other great things about our church, but the outreach to the local community is definitely one that has stuck out to me.

Hey! We Went to A Marriage Conference

And it was amazing!

I've already blogged about the experience on my other blog, but since marriage is (obviously) such a large part of my life I wanted to put a shout out over here too.

If you want to ready the whole journey of how it came to be that we went, read:

this

then this

and lastly this


Long story short, I cannot say enough for the experience, and how it has positively transformed our relationship, our marriage, and as a result our family. We're still a work in progress, there's always work to do, always ways to improve, but I never would have believed that we could see such an immense change in just a few short days.

I've tried to write about it over & over, because I personally know so many other couples are - or have - struggled in their marriages, and I want to share this resource with them, with all of you, but words just keep failing me.

Maybe the timing is wrong, maybe the words are wrong, I don't know. All I can say is that we are so very, very glad that we made the decision to go, and I do believe we will see a lasting change in our marriage and in our selves as individuals because of it.

Praise be to God!