It's been a while.....

Hello faithful blog followers!

First I would like apologize for my lack of faithfulness to the blog and ask for some grace. I would say that I have had probably the busiest month of my life and I am very happy to see it start to settle down a little bit. Right now I'm house sitting for the senior pastor of my church, he is out of town for a couple weeks visiting friends and family in mexico. So I'm enjoying some peace and quiet and shark week from the parsonage. Reminds me of the time my family lived in the parsonage at maplewood, hahaha.

Oh yeah, and sorry, I don't think I have any pictures for this blog post, I will try to add something, but no guarantees. I promise to add pics on my next post!

Lets see, where should I start? Let me rewind to to about a month ago.

As part of my job, Director of Youth Ministries, I attend two consecutive weeks at church camp, which is awesome. The camp is called Ceta Canyon, which is part of the Palo Duro canyon system that lies north of Lubbock and south of Amarillo. It's about a four or five hour drive from Abilene. Just as a side note, the citizens of Abilene don't think it's a big deal to drive a long distance to get somewhere, I guess it's normal when you live in the middle of nowhere! Back to the story. You know when you go on a trip and you just show up and hop in a van and go? That's nice, it's a little bit more stressful when you are the one planning the trip, making sure that everyone is where they are supposed to be and that everything is accounted for. I had the task of organizing volunteers to drive together in a caravan fashion and I rode up in that caravan on both sunday mornings. The kids all rode up on monday in the church van, and driven by a member of the church. When the van got up to Ceta, I switched cars with the driver so that I would drive the van home, trailer and all. Which I was pretty impressed with myself and my driving skills with a 15 passenger van full of kids and a trailer behind it. I think I'm ready for family vacations ;) Anyway, the camp of awesome. When you are driving up to it, it is flat, flat, flat and then you just stumble on this giant hole in the ground.

In the canyon, there is no cell service, which is great for students that are enslaved to their mobile devices, not great for councilors that want to stay in touch with their beautiful fiancees. So a couple of nights, all the councilors drove to the rim to call their loved ones. One such evening while I was on the rim I was able to watch a thunderstorm moving across the horizon, AMAZING!! It was so cool.

The camp was really great. It was neat to interact with students from other churches. It was fun because they are sometimes more willing to open up to councilors, because of the environment. I saw a lot of kids really have great camp experiences, along with realizing God's love for them perhaps for the first time! Very cool! Other events included usual camp experiences like swimming, hiking, games, singing, and the like.

So like I said, I did this for back to back weeks. It was kinda cool to be able to do that. The first week was high schoolers and the next was middle schoolers. It was definantly draining, but great. I can't wait to go back next year.

On the way back from the second week of camp I had the not so great experience of losing my wallet :( Which of coarse is a less than desirable event and consequently added a nice bit of stress to my life. I'm slowly piecing my life back together as you read this.

But, all that aside, the next week of my life was quite amazing. Brittany came down to visit for a short week and see what life is like as a texan. It was so great to see another northerner that had my same accent! Hahaha, but seriously, it was so nice to be able to see Brittany and hold her hand and just "be" together. Although our entire relationship has mostly been long distance of one sort or another, it genuinely sucks to be 1200 miles apart. I had the wonderful opportunity to show her around town, see my church, and meet the people that I interact with. It was really great! My host family even through a small party so that Brittany could meet some people from the church. We also got some engagement photos done, the ones that we saw were good. Some were a little awkward, but I'm a little awkward anyways, so it's all good. Brittany even borrowed some cowboy boots for the photo shoot! Very cool. I'm looking forward to trying to get her down here as soon as possible again. It was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo hard to drive her back to the airport. That seriously sucked, no joke. But while she was here, we got new phones and are now on the same phone plan. As we pretend to be adults, this is just another way that we are trying to make people believe that we are adults. Hahaha, it's so weird trying to be an adult! Anyway, we got phones with texting and I have literally not stopped texting her since she left! So now it's back to the long distance stuff, but I feel incredibly renewed by her trip. I can't wait to see her again.

Well, after that great time with Brittany, it's back to "work" for me. I love my job! It is so rewarding and challenging. The more that I do it, I realize that most of my everyday tasks involve planning. Planning for games, talks, parties, trips and everything in between. I had a couple of short days to prep some last minute plans for our mystery trip. And we left on wednesday and just got back friday night, or yesterday. We had a great trip to the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. Huge Cities! That was another fun driving adventure. Driving the van with trailer while having another van follow you through a busy city that you have never been in while not having a great navigator as your copilot was to say, "an adventure." We saw and did a lot of fun things, from a scavenger hunt in a huge mall, to a zoo, to a water park, to touring the original dr. pepper plant. Very cool. Both nights we had a devotional time with one night my intern Austin gave the message and the next it was myself. Both nights the kids had the pleasure of trying to sing worship songs with Austin and myself playing our guitars. We were not great at it, but it was good none the less, just make a joyful noise to the Lord, right? It doesn't have to be great, thank goodness.

So this upcoming week is my last week with Austin and then he goes back to school at Oklahoma University. It will be really interesting because he has basically been there the whole time that I have, so it will be weird without him. Then, towards the end of august I have an overnight staff retreat. I'm pretty excited about that because I really like the people I work with. I will try and update you on my life a little bit more timely and with more pics in the future. Can't wait to hear more from you later! Love you all. Miss you like crazy, but lovin my call here.