What a week! Whew!!

Wow! What a week! January is our Generosity month at church. We hosted a dinner on Monday night for our leadership. The staff serves the dinner and then we sit together at a table in the back of the room. Our gift to each leader was a book by Miraslov Volf. I spent a lot of time tying ribbons on books!

The colors for this month's generosity sermon series logo are navy, pinks, and gold.

When I say we serve...we all serve - the office staff, the youth staff, music ministry, kid's ministry, etc. The dinner was lovely and was cooked by our chef, Bert. We served about two hundred leaders.

The menu was petite filets, fancy potatoes, and haricot verts. We also had a lovely salad and a dessert (which I didn't eat).

Susan (kid's min) and Jackson (worship and student ministry) were cutting her steak. Plastic knives do not work on steaks haha!! It was pretty gold plastic but it didn't work well on steak.

Mark and our brother-in-law, Bob, went to the farm one day this week. Mark loves to fish and has just the right lake to catch delicious fish!

Tuesday night was Young Adult night at our house. 

Kathy made a poundcake for them. We made jambalaya, green beans, rolls, and salad. Mark sliced 4 pounds of Conecuh sausage and three pounds of chicken for that jambalaya. I couldn't have done it this week without his help. After working a 12 hour day on Monday and preparing the Bible study for the night and working in the office Tuesday until 2:00 . . .I was done.

I worked about 10 hours on Wednesday - normal Wednesday. On Thursday night we went out to eat with our Sunday School "out to eat" supper club group. The food was delicious. The conversation was great! I took zero pictures!! There are ten of us in the group so there was plenty to talk about. Mark had a seafood omelette. He said it was really good. I can't imagine seafood inside an omelette. I had shrimp kebobs, salad, fruit, and hummus.

I had PT on Friday morning at 8 and yay!! my back is definitely better.

Then I hurried home and took a quiz for my class. I hastily changed out of yoga pants to rush out the door to meet three friends for lunch. I texted the photo below to my friends and asked if they would be ashamed of me due to my casual attire. They love me and said they could care less what I was wearing!

Friday night we invited two other couples to join us for dinner. We had salad, asparagus, baked sweet potatoes, and chicken wrapped in bacon. Have you ever ordered from Burgers Smokehouse? I love to order those bacon wrapped chicken breasts. They are so tasty!! They are not cheap, but they are worth it! Burgers Smokehouse folks don't know me and they aren't giving me anything to talk about them, but if you want to order some check it out here. Granted, I wish they would see this and send me an 8 pack! haha!

Saturday morning I headed to the wholesale florist for 300 carnations that I had pre-ordered. We tied cards to each one with instructions to give them away. This morning, we gave them to children as they headed to the parking lot and asked them to give to a friend or neighbor as an act of service and generosity.

This was me after loading and unloading 300 carnations on Saturday! I had on ZERO make up and a t-shirt and exercise shorts. Of course, I saw people but they were all dressed to work, too.

This is how the Welcome desk looked today! You can see the lovely back drop with the navy, pinks, and gold. The temperature got up to almost 70 on Saturday, but today is a whole different story.

While I was at the Wholesale Florist on Saturday, Mark was down at our daughter's "new" house - they bought a fixer upper in Wetumpka. They are doing the demo themselves to save money. Mark demo'd the kitchen. I haven't seen the house yet except via FaceTime.

Here is the before.

Here is Mark after he did the demo. You can follow our daughter @shortredlandreno on instagram as the reno.

The high temp was at midnight and it has been dropping steadily all day. We had snow flurries this morning. It is 31 degrees at 5:22 p.m. on Sunday evening and the low tonight is 17. This is Alabama. This is the deep south. Right now, that Siberian air is whooshing through. BRRR. Birmingham is right on the line -- the snow is actually going all the way to the coast. We may or may not get snow but we are definitely getting cold air.

Update on our family -- Bill and Rebecca continue to decline. Mark and his siblings have found a place where we can move Bill. Rebecca is not going to be able to care for him with her own cancer progressing. It is very sad. Our son (38 years old) is having some surgery tomorrow morning and will have anywhere from a one night to a three night stay in the hospital. Mark is on tap to spend the night with him at the hospital.

I taught on Philippians this morning and we were talking about running our race at a more mature age. Some days we run our race with ease and some days our race is a tad harder. Even when it is tough, we can discover the joy in our journey.