Thankful for all of you

The past 6 days have been a whirlwind for me. I left work at about 7:30 on Wednesday and made the trek, "over the river and through the wood's to Grandmother's house" and spent a wonderful thanksgiving with my family. Suffice it to say that having Dad their with us was particularly awesome. he has come a LONG, LONG way. He still needs our prayer. He is dealing with fear and discouragement so all of you that know him, give him a call or drop a line.

Because of the death in the Church, we traveled back on Saturday. Saturday's Memorial service was certainly memorable. Our Church was filled to capacity and then some. Folding chairs were brought out, people were standing around the perimeter of the inside of the building and the foyer and stairway were filled. Then the crowd spilled out into the sidewalks up and down the front of the Church. My best estimate is between 300 to 350 people with many of them having gang affiliations. I was able to share a simple message of the gospel with them and the service went beautifully, until the end. At the end we had a minor disruption that could have escalated into a much larger one but God gave me grace and wisdom and in the end, many, many young people heard the message. I won't go into detail about the disruption because my Mom reads this and Chicago scares her to death anyway but ALL IS WELL, MOM!

I had already planned to have a guest speaker for Sunday, so Debbie, Sam and I took the opportunity for some down time. And what a great time together we had. It's good to be back, although when I returned home my computer had crashed. :<( I'll get it going again though, I'm sure. Hope you all were blessed beyond measure over the Holiday!