Last Summer Wednesday

Well, our summer Wednesday night Bible study is over. We will take next week off before beginning Awana on September 12th.

We had a great summer filled with many fun times and I hope for you a profitable Bible study in the book of Colossians (even though we barely made it into chapter 2). I hope you also enjoyed the times of prayer we had together each night through the year. I cannot stress enough how important prayer and Bible study are for our individual lives; not just for a Wednesday night Bible study.

I thought I would include a video clip of our last night playing volleyball for you all to enjoy.

Our last night just happened to also be Jess' 16th birthday. So we made a cake to celebrate our summer and her birthday (and many other birthdays too). We had made a car cake for Luke's 1st birthday since he likes cars so much, so we thought we could put it to good use for Jess too concerning a certain phrase about cars that she likes so much. Thanks a ton to Brittany for making the cake! Here are some pics.

Yeah, so the last one was due to a little cupcake in the face after Bible study. Jess will be smelling funfetti for the next few days.

Anyway, thanks for coming to Bible study throughout the summer. Hope you enjoyed it!

CBC Kids Karnival

We had a really great day on Saturday at Kids Karnival and we were thankful to the Lord for the nice weather he gave us.

Since blogger now provides opportunities to upload video clips...and since I took some, I thought I would share them with you. I'll try to post more pics later.

Here is Jess getting dunked by Brad. Ha Ha!

Ok, I guess I'll include this one too!

The Big TeePee!

Well, Sunday didn't take as long to get to in real life on our trip as it did in this post, but it is finally here!

On Sunday we attended Riverwood Bible Church for Sunday School and the Morning Worship service. Some of the members of our group (Alyson, Jess, Jakob, Liz, Rachel, Kathleen, and Elisa) had the opportunity to do special music at Riverwood. They played and sang "Grace Alone". And they did a really good job!

It is hard to see everyone, but this is our group performing at Riverwood.

We also had the opportunity to hear Pastor Jerry Clark continue his study on prayer, which I enjoyed very much as I always enjoy listening to Pastor Clark teach.

At the end of the service we stood in the back of the church and folks greeted us as they walked out. Some of our group got hugs and the "arm grab". I think some people were a little taken back by those arm grabs. But Riverwood is a touchy type of church and in the South sometimes are a little different anyway. There is lots of hugging (appropriately) and stuff amongst friends and in the body of Christ. And the girls met Mrs. Scarbrough (Mr. Michael Scarbrough's (from CBC) mom).

After church we went back to FOA changed clothes and went to Big D's BBQ for lunch. Big D's is just a couple miles from FOA and not too far from our Catfish Haven stop on Saturday. Big D's is located next to a railroad track and has the slogan "Good Enough to Stop the Train" and apparently it has before as the engineers stop the train on the tracks and go in for a bite to eat. On the day we were there, however, a few trains went by without stopping.

Big D's does have good BBQ, but one of the interesting parts about the place is that the dining room is the inside of a TeePee. Now this is no regular TeePee made from animal skins or what have you. This one is made from a much harder material the thing is big enough to hold like 40-50 people. There are many Native American flags hanging from the ceiling and cool things painted on the walls. So it was pretty fun and good tasting. And they had pretty good pie too.

The TeePee doesn't look that big from outside but inside...

...it actually is quite large and includes many Native American flags

and a chandalier made out of antlers.

I just thought this was a cool picture.

After lunch we headed back to FOA to just hang out until the evening service at Berean. A few of the girls went to my sister's (Amy) house for a makeover. Amy is a Mary Kay makeup person and she was "practicing" on the girls. Sounds scary but the makeovers turned out good. Some of the others went swimming and others did, well, "other stuff".

I guess this is some "copycat" picture of the JB's that UI did after their makovers.

On Sunday night, we had the evening service at Berean. We sang some worship choruses that Jess played for. We also had some special music by Elisa and Kathleen and Liz. Warren did some magic for the guys and used it to present the gospel and talk about the Christian life. I gave a short (ok, we know that's not true) lesson from part of our study in Colossians on Wednesday nights (so obviously it was from chapter 1). We had a really good time doing all of that.

Elisa played "Amazing Grace".

After church, we headed back to the Philemon house for pizza and "coke". Then we played capture the flag outside until 10 p.m. Matt Sprayberry (my really good friend) came out and joined us. He was on the team with many of the crazy girls so they called themselves - Team ADHD. That is an understatement. No one won, we ran out of time. It was pretty hard in the dark with unfamiliar territory for most people playing.



After that we went in, got cleaned up, and headed to bed. We had to get up early in the morning to start the week!

Another fun day had passed; many more to come.

CBC meets FOA and RBC

After settling in and meeting the MS critters, we all (I think) got a pretty good night's rest in preparation for all that day 2 had in store...and boy was it a lot.

After morning devotions we headed over to the FOA chapel (Berean Bible Church) for an orientation to the ministry of FOA. We heard about the focus of the ministry and its beginnings. We heard about God's faithfulness overy many years to this ministry in many ways. This year FOA celebrates its 49th anniversary. The focus of this ministry is helping men with drug and alcohol addictions. In contrast to the way the world views drug and alcohol addiction (as a disease), FOA views it as sin. Because of this, they teach these men the Word of God and new life in Jesus Christ as the answer they need to deal with their problem with sin.

The ministry of FOA is supported by church and individual donations. This doesn't just include financial donations, but anything that the ministry could use. Some people just give old stuff or junk to FOA. FOA then in turn cleans it up and sells it at a monthly garage sale at the ministry. As we were going through the metal building with all the garage sale stuff, I found a priceless possession that seems to have just been waiting there for me. So priceless that my dad told me to just take it.

Although it is hard to read, this jar says, "Ashes of Obnoxious Teenagers". I haven't decided yet who will be the first to enter the jar, but there were many people who obviously wanted to try and be the first. I won't name any names.

We continued our tour of the facilities and got acquainted with the grounds the best we could before the rain came in. By the way, the rain was a constant the first part of our trip.

For lunch we decided to head just a mile away from FOA to a place called Catfish Haven. Mississippi is known for farm raised catfish. While not everyone ventured to order the catfish, most everyone gave it a try. Fried catfish, hushpuppies, fried pickles, and sweet tea. Oh yeah, good eatin'.

Everyone's excited about catfish!

Fried Pickles!

3 catfish, small stomach

No catfish, big stomach

After lunch we headed out on the town of Jackson. Jackson is not a huge town, but I thought I would take our group to a few special places to Brit and I. Our first stop was the Sanders land where we used live and I used to work. Both these places are literally in the middle of cow pastures, but we loved it out there. Our friends (and my former boss) Greg and Karen Sanders and their children weren't there, but we did get to see Greg's parents, B.J. and Maxine Sanders. They showed the kids some of the land and then had us over to their house for some wonderful mint tea (one of my favorites) and tea cakes (cookies). It was great. I told everyone that Mrs. Maxine is one of the nicest people on the face of the earth. After meeting her, I think most everyone agreed.

This is Mrs. Maxine and Mr. B.J. (red shirt) on their front porch.
That's me drinking some mint tea!

Brad taming a goat.

At the Sander's house.
Ryan didn't venture to try mint tea,
he stuck with his water.

I parked in the best spot in the pasture.
As soon as I got out, I stepped in the cow pie.
But we got a good picture of man's righteousness - right Warren?

After the good mint tea and the great Southern hospitality, I decided to take our group driving down a portion of the Natchez Trace. The Trace is an old roadway that stretches from southwest MS to Nashville, TN. There are no big trucks on it and it goes through forested area most of the way. The speed limit is only 55mph, but the scenery is nice, and every once in a while you may see some wildlife roaming about.

A portion of the Trace passes the Ross Barnett Reservoir. There is a place called Lookout Point that we stopped at to see the reservoir.

The boys playing football by the reservoir

Tall trees!

Liz took this nice picture of Brit and I
enjoying a peaceful moment.

Jess enjoying her peaceful moment...
WITH A TREE!!

By the way, the reservoir (not Lookout Point but another place) was where I proposed to Brittany!

This picture was taken in the van at some point during this day. I had to include it because this picture is so awesome. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it. I mean how can you get your face to do that. Kathleen, that is an awesome picture; one for the ages!

After finishing up there we drove over to Riverwood Bible Church to join their youth group for a night of fun and fellowship. After everyone arrived at the church, we headed for CiCi's for some pizza. After we finished eating we came back to the church where we spent some time in the Word of God. We then played some violent games. Let's see: hockey, scatterball, and bombardment. Thankfully, no one got seriously injured, although Harold Sprayberry (RBC's youth pastor) did get his nose cut (by one of his own youth).

Scatterball is the RBC dodgeball game. It is a lot of fun, but our CBC group wanted to challenge RBC to a game of CBC bombardment. So we did...actually 3 games. The result, RBC beat us 2 out of 3 at our own game. We wanted to get a rematch later in the week, but unfortunately that didn't work out. Here are some pics of the night!

The great Harold Sprayberry!
"No autographs, please"

Hockey

Scatterball

Harold's bloody nose

CBC leaders finding a safe spot

Bombardment

CBC

RBC

Let the game begin!

What a good looking group!

After all of this we were wiped out. But it was a great day. Thanks to RBC for being such nice hosts.

2 days down, 7 to go. Man I'm getting tired just thinking about it all.