New Spring Visit

Michael and I drove to NewSpring Church in Anderson, SC yesterday to check out their student ministry, and to meet with their Youth Pastor, Brad, and his assistant, Whitney.

I was so thinking I was going to be a mostly-silent observer as Michael talked youth ministry with Whitney and Brad, but Brad's cousin, Barry was there visiting Brad, and he and I ended up chatting while Michael was hanging with Whitney getting the ins and outs of how youth ministry happens at NewSpring. Barry was so interesting. He'd traveled doing stage set up with BonJovi for 3 tours, he'd met Eddie Van Halen, and many other big-name rockers. He was a great talker and a great listener. I had a blast just sharing life stories with him.

Then we met Leslie, who is a volunteer at NewSpring. I think I remember her from Unleashed - the volunteer on the welcome team with the bull horn (I'm pretty sure she's the same person). Anyway, she was super sweet and welcoming, and it was so fun hearing Michael share the Suches, GA story with her, because she knew who most of the staff was from Revolution, and she keeps up with them on twitter.

I love meeting good, down-to-earth people who are willing to share their life in open and honest ways with other people, even complete strangers, which we pretty much were yesterday, but 5 minutes into conversations with Barry, Leslie, Whitney and Brad, it didn't seem like we were strangers at all.

I pray that I can be transparent and down to earth and make people feel as special as I felt yesterday.

Fuse is what we experienced last night at NewSpring. There was a lot of excitement there! The students had just come off their summer trip called the Gauntlet. Brad's message was a strong encouragement to all the students and especially to those who had attended the Gauntlet (about 550ish students altogether and Fuse experienced its highest attendance last night of 440ish students) to take action regarding what they experienced with God while they were at the Gauntlet. The music was rockin'! Everything was pumpin'! It was a great experience.

I'll have to blog about the gutsy video they showed later.
More to come...

asics storm

So excited!!! I got a pair of Asics running shoes today. Since I began running several months ago, I have been running in Reebok Cross Trainers, which have been great shoes, but now that I have these running shoes on, I feel like I'm walking on clouds. They are sooo cushiony. I can't wait to take a run in them. We are running in a 5K in Canton on Saturday morning. I've been working some on increasing my speed, so we'll see how that goes on Saturday. I guess I'm going to try to get a run in tomorrow and then we are going riding on some trails at Carter's Lake on Friday.

I was in a major cleaning/organizing/catching up mode today, and I did get a lot done, but there's always sooo much to do.

We began watching season one of "Lost." We are 1.5 episodes in, and I'm still not sure what I think. I'm intrigued because my friend Lindsay, who doesn't get "The Lord of the Rings" (one of my major favs) is into "Lost." A great thing it has going for it so far is that Dominic Monaghan, who was Merry in "The Lord of the Rings" is Charlie Pace on "Lost."

blogging, twitter, journaling, etc.

My world is filled with jotting down my thoughts.

I do the following:
keep a personal journal
write my thoughts to God
keep an exercise/workout journal
twitter
blog, which I don't keep up with well because of all the other thought jotting I do

And on blogger, you really have to think about what you are writing, not that i have some huge following, but it's going on the world wide web from me, so it can't be un-thought out stuff. I'm not complaining about it. I just have to figure out where blogger is going to go and what purpose I want it to serve. It's so wide open as to what I could blog about, but then it's not really at the exact same time. I'm not one to get up on soap boxes, so it's not like i'm going to share my opinion in some ominous way, and I'm not one to strongly even share my opinion about things in general, although my closest friends may disagree, but I won't do that on an internet blog. And then there's the whole deal that I could share what I did in my quiet time, but I'm not really feeling that either. So here I am going on and on about nothing really. Is that it - I have nothing to say to who knows who could be reading this, other than maybe two other people.

But there's something about it and something to it. Like my two followers could smile when they read this or maybe even someone else might happen upon this blog and be able to relate or at least be amused. I'm trying to think of why I look at other people's blogs. To see something they don't reveal to me or to learn something about someone, even someone I don't really know. To experience how other people live life.

Well, I don't know the answer, but for now I'll keep trudging along with all my thought jotting.

My church, Revolution, is doing a series coming up called, "Alive." The premise is that if you knew you had 30 days left to live, what would you do differently, and why aren't you living that way already. Good question, and one maybe I'll expound on in my blog.
:)

Toodles!

tomorrow is race day!!!

JULY 4th - Getting up at 5:30 to give my coffee and breakfast time to settle in before leaving at 6:30 for a 7:30 start to the Woodstock Freedom Run. Then in the afternoon we are going to see "Get Smart" with the Hotze's. Then it's grillin' and fireworks at the ranch to end the day. I'm hoping Ginger will actually make it through the night without waking up for a potty run around midnight, which has become her dealio the past few nights, even though we let her out right before we go to bed, and even though she can get up in the morning, eat, and sleep for hours without needing to go out except right after she eats. She may be 12 years old, blind and deaf, but she sure hasn't forgotten how to get our attention with the non-stop barking until she gets let out. She's still my sweet girl though. :)

running fun

So I guess I'm into running now, and I'm enjoying it. I ran my first 5K at the end of May, and I'm running my second one on Friday in Woodstock. I'm working on improving my stamina and pace. I ran four 1/4 distances with 2 minute rests in between yesterday, which is the beginning of a 5-week program to a faster 5K that I read about in a running magazine.

Michael marked off 1/4 mile for me using his GPS on a road near our house (it's 30 minutes to the nearest track), and the distance is in between two fields of cows, one on each side of the road, and they both have at least 50+ cows in them, which makes for entertainment and a fun smell as I'm running along. I'm not fast at all. I've never been a fast runner, but I have had a previous stint of running in the early 90's when I was running 3 miles at a time, but I didn't do it for very long. We rode our bikes a little over 1/2 mile to the straight away, and after I was done, we took the long way home and road about 2 more miles. Michael just road along and did stuff on his bike while I was running. It was fun!

We are thinking of participating in a mini triathlon, but swimming is definitely a bigger area of weakness for me. I'll keep you posted.