Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Our day started out rainy but turned out to be quite nice. The outlying areas have already had a frost - sure hope that is not an indication of our winter! It has been a busy August so far with things just about to completely get out of hand. We have had baptisms on the first two Sundays in August which were all a result of VBS (here and in Georgia). Ray is shown in the picture with three cousins, Jade & Sammy Wilson who are brothers and Ethan Wilson who is their cousin. I can hear Ray saying there is water here if anyone else wishes to come and be baptized.

We are getting ready for our new Sunday School year with hopefully an additional class. We will do some teacher training next Sunday. BUT this Sunday Ray has all the music/instrumental people meeting to set up praise teams. We had three but one couple moved south and we need to reorganize....we may even have four teams. Pray with him about how he uses the time and the importance of the team understanding that LEADING WORSHIP is such a responsibility.

We will be having College/Single Bible studies the 1st & 3rd Sunday nights and Young Marrieds on the 2nd & 4th Sunday nights. We have 14 to 15 young couples with 20 children - so this will need to have a lot of details worked out. NAIT has become GPRC (Grande Prairie Regional College) and they seem very open to working with us and promoting any college programs we have. Now if they would just stop having BEER NIGHT for the students...that would be a great improvement.

We also still do a rotation at the nursing home (Longterm care) and the retirement home (Harvest Lodge) on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes the schedule hits where we will do two a month. All of the above can make for a long Sunday - so when you think of us pray for our strength to be from the Lord.

I am getting beets out of the garden and we are eating lettuce, onions and carrots. I made some Harvard beets and was able to get some peaches from BC (British Columbia) and made jam. SEE ABOVE PICTURE. I need Matt here to help me shoot my food pictures!! He and Heather went to the balloon festival and enjoyed seeing it all. He took some great pictures.

I guess all our grandboys will start school this coming Monday....ready or not. Caleb said he was "sorta" ready for school. Luke was chosen to speak about one of his teachers at the Nokia center on 8/18/09. There will be an elementary student, junior high student and high school student speaking. There will be around 6000 teachers and administrators listening to him speak - he is excited and nervous - please pray for him to have a real peace about his speech.

We are planning a trip to Texas for Thanksgiving to eat some turkey! Can't wait to see all the family and find out how school has started out for the boys. We were able to get Roots (a Canadian brand) backpacks for the boys and hopefully Canada Post and the USPS will not let us down in getting the bags to them. There is no such thing as OVERNIGHT from up here or to up here!!

We are going to run over to see how the young marrieds are doing at the camp out - looks like we might have some more rain....

NOW A REVISION FROM OUR LAST POST - Ray's BC fishing trip - those were not Monk seals (those are in Hawaii - I knew the name sounded familiar) The picture was of Sea Lions!! Now you have the truth of the matter.

Love you all and pray for a great day of worship for each of you tomorrow.