Greater Things

25 years ago, in the home of a Coral Springs couple, Coral Baptist Church started with a few dozen people. Today, Church by the Glades hosts almost 4,000 members, has 6 services a weekend, celebrated almost 1,000 baptisms in the last two years and is ready for a bigger building! We are literally busting out of our auditorium.

I'm not sure I can really explain how amazing the growth of our church has been without having you live in South Florida for even a month. People, we are not in the Bible Belt here. We're more the stinky feet. But the pure excitement reverberating from our little corner of the world is awesome.

A couple of weeks ago, we started a new series, "Greater Things" to gear us up for the hard work ahead. The building we are shooting for will take 15 to 17 million to build. It will take 8 million just to get started. We are asking for a miracle and I am asking for your prayers.

Last night, we held a special song and prayer service to lift our request to God and thank Him in advance for the blessings He is going to rain down upon us. There were hands raising all over the place and the Holy Spirit was among us. For the last prayer, we went outside where the footprint of the new building was waiting for us in candles.

You can barely go anywhere in our town without seeing a Church by the Glades window decal and now we all have yellow bracelets as well to remind us to pray. Pray we will.

Babies, Babies Everywhere

Because everyone expressed such great interest in our baby fish (ie. Tamara), I attempted to take some photos of them the other day.

See! Look! That little, bitty blur?


How about here? See it?


Ok, well, here are the two, what I suppose to be the parents. Very protective.


Eh, well here's the duck sitting on her nest.


Can't see that either, huh. Here's a close up. See the white? That's her head.


Science lesson done for the day.

**Edited to add: Actually, if you click on the second pic and make it big, if you scroll down a bit, you can see one of the babies. Just about the size of one of the pebbles in the tank.

Did You Know?

Kristin tagged me for a meme, so here it goes.

List 6 things about yourself that most people probably don't know.

I'm not sure if I can come up with 6 things, but I will give it a whirl.

1. I never took a typing class, however, after almost 9 years of working in an office and typing dictation, I am pretty fast. I don't always have to look at my fingers and I don't use the right ones by any means, but it gets the job done.

2. On a similar note, I cannot spell deterioration unless I am typing it. For some reason my fingers know where to go even if my brain does not.

3. I am a consultant for a scrapbooking company called Close to My Heart. I don't hold parties for people, but I do have a group of women that meet every month at my house and complete 2 pages. I really like it and it's a great creative outlet for me. If I had time, I would like to branch out eventually and maybe actually make some money off of it.

4. Our house is fertile grounds lately. We have a duck nest in our front bushes and although the adult ducks in Florida are UGLY, you can't help but love the little ones. I'm excited about the babies. Also, one of our fish had babies and we have about 15-20 little, bitty baby fish swimming in our tank. I hope they don't get eaten. I think I know who the parents are because our two Convicts are hanging around them and I'd like to think they are protecting them. Hopefully, they aren't protecting them just to snack on later.

5. I really like working with my hands and I am definitely the handy one around the house. I would love to learn to work with power tools and make things, like furniture and stuff. Just one more thing to thing about when the kids leave the house.

6. I'm really glad that we had the boys as young as we did. By the time we are 50, they should be out of the house, at least in college. I would love to sell the house, maybe buy a little condo as a home base and then see the country in an RV. Our neighbor has one and I am a little bit jealous.

Hey, I did better than I thought I would.

Decorating

With Larry out of town, I've been taking care of some miscellaneous decorating stuff that I had been putting off. When we were in Nashville a couple of months ago, my parents took the boys to the museum and they painted with watercolors. I really liked the end result, so I had them matted and then framed them.

Here is Peyton's. I think he made a mistake and was going to color it all black, but I'm glad he stopped. That would have made for a very dark picture. He says Grandmommy and Poppy took the good one home. I told him it looks like a water scene and the dark is a rock. He agreed that that explanation would work.

Shey had a long explantation explaining his picture, but when he rambles like that, sometimes it is hard to understand him. The side of his picture was torn purposefully, and I hate that that didn't show after I had them mounted.

I also took picures of Peyton's walls. The boy will hang anything and everything on them. I use painter's tape, so it comes off easily. It's actually pretty cool and he groups his different items together so well. I took these last night while he was sleeping.

Ike

Allow me please to whine, complain, bitch, moan and be completely selfish for this entry.

Larry and I are independent insurance adjusters for the same company. We are the liaisons between a multitude of insurance companies who write commercial policies and their insureds. I am also the office manager for the Florida office as well as over the Tampa, Nashville and Charlotte offices. I carry a small amount of files, but as things get busier, like they are about to, my load will increase as well.

Okay, now for the whining.

During the 04-05 hurricane season when Katrina hit and Florida collided with about 8 hurricanes over the course of the two years were some of the most stressful years of my life. Shey was born December 2004 and I really don't remember much of his first 18 months. Imagine tax season for accountants, but lasting 2-3 years without a break.

I remember in the height of it all standing outside on our patio wanting to claw my skin off. I made an appointment with my doctor pretty soon after that and he prescribed me Lexipro. I stayed on the medication for about 4 months to get me through the worst of it.

The last two years have been a nice reprieve, but now Ike is bearing down on Texas and here we go. Larry is already slated for the first wave and will probably leave Monday morning for at least a week. Thankfully, I have a great admin staff working for me now instead of the string of temps that came through a couple of years ago, but it is still going to be extremely hectic and upside down.

I feel for the people in Texas, I really do. It's going to suck for them big time, I know, but the selfish part of me is crying for me too.

I just really don't want to live through that again.

High School Pics

I was going through some old photos the other day and found these three that I thought I would share. I have more and now that I know my scanner works, I will post them sometime.

Here's Tamara. I think this was at one of our graduation teas. Remember how crazy we went? EVERYONE had a tea!



Here's Jonathan and Kristin WAY before she became 3 for Momma! I think this was at Winterfest.



And here's Carrie and me. I think this was at Winterfest too. I'm not sure why I look so serious. ha ha Look at those eyebrows! Whenever I look through old photos of myself, I never freak about my hair, but I do always want to go back and wax my eyebrows.



I know I have pics of Rebecca too, but for some reason, there weren't any in the pile I was looking through. I'm going to pull out my chorus album and post some of those. That should be fun!