Golf, Go Karts, and Go Cubs...

Last Saturday we went out to the Aurora Sports Zone (you know, the big white bubble) for a Sr. High activity.

This was no ordinary Saturday night activity though. Why you may ask. Because the Cubs were playing game 3 of the opening round playoff series against the Diamondbacks...and they were down 2 games to none. Basically, this could be the Cubs last game of the year. Now most of you know that within our group we have some Cubs fans and some Sox fans. And then we have some really hard core Cubs fans - like Melinda and Brad. Yes, I know there are others but these individuals took strides to listen to the game on the radio while eating, in the car ride and at the mini golf place (they actually had a TV going with the game on). And yet while these Cub fans could have stayed at home, they came anyway. I'm glad they did!

So we started the night with subs, chips, and pop. Then we headed straight for the "bubble". We started out with a round of golf. Some were serious, others not so much, but that was fine. We did have some nice swarms of gnats to greet us.

After 18 holes of golf we headed for the go karts. The thing about the go karts is that some are faster than others. The one I was in, not so fast. In fact I got passed by a few people including Jess who started behind me and Dan who started way in front of me. Basically Rick and I had slower carts and just "brother in lawed" it the whole way.

The ligthouse

Hey, how did your ball get in the grass

After go karts we headed back to the church for some ice cream (thanks Mr. Sadler) and a devotion on some of the Proverbs. After the devo we had just enough time for a game of flashlight freeze tag before heading home.

We had a great time (I think and hope)...but, the Cubs lost. So as hard as we were pulling for them, they could not pull it out and to that we can only say..."There's always next year".

Let's try this again...

Ok, so I know that some people come and check in at this blog to see if anything is updated and has been said as of late. Obviously you all know that as of late - ok for a long time now (like the end of August) this blog has not been updated.

I have a lot to catch up on, but rather than try to catch up on it all at once and miss out on new stuff going on, I am going to try to intermingle some posts. So you may see a MS trip post intermingled with October stuff and so forth.

Please forgive me for my unfaithfulness to my blog...I will try to continue to post some new stuff.

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.