We had a good devotional the first night--Karen always does such a wonderful job. Then we had good fellowship for a while before going to bed. Actually, some of us fellowshipped a little too much. I finally threw in the towel and went to bed at 2:00 or so, but I heard that some of the guys stayed up until 3:30 or some such insane hour. Talking about sports, of all things. I hung in there for as long as I could, but it's definitely not worth it to go sleepless when the conversation moves beyond my limited knowledge in any given catergory. In sports, you've got to be discussing football alone and it's got to be about the Broncos and it has to be in that fantastic era from the mid-80's up until John Elway's retirement in 1999. After that, I'm pretty clueless!

We started off with breakfast the next day. Lots and lots of breakfast! You wouldn't believe how much food we had at this Retreat. We were all expecting more people to be there and of course it's always better to have too much than too little... or so we thought! Ha! TONS of cinnamon rolls and breakfast burritos. Lunch time rolled around and we had TONS of spaghetti (Karen's homemade meatballs and sauce made from Alan's home grown tomatoes and herbs! Wow!) and a whole slew of giant loaves of French bread and salad and corn on the cob... Enough that we ate it all again for dinner and still had left-overs! There was tons of fresh fruit and cereal the next day, and muffins and who knows what all. The bestest thing of all was the sweetened raspberries that Sister VanDeventer brought! WOW!!! I ate way, way, way too many of them. And I'd be happy to eat some more if I could get my hands on some! And these dainty little cookies that she made--they were very thin and had some sort of icing drizzled over the top, then three or four pieces of thinly sliced almonds arranged on top of that. The sort of thing you'd expect to have at a fancy tea party. I'm not a fancy tea party kind of a gal myself, but I'm forever a great cookie kind of a gal! ;-)

Let's see... I started this post some time ago and was in quite the mood to write. Since then, James has had me wrestling with this dippy scanner of ours, trying to get it to hand over some forms so that I could e-mail them to Jon. Ooooh, I really dislike that contraption. Anyway, now it's midnight and I'm going to have to quit all of the unnecessary rambling. Or at least some of it. ;-)

We tried something different at Retreat this year. We usually have lots of classes and such, but this time we had several "discussion groups" instead. For the most part they went very, very well and everybody really seemed to enjoy them. The only class we had was the one on the Advice to Members and appropriate dress, me teaching the ladies and Sam Kaufman teaching the men. My class was... Oh, I don't know! I guess it went well, but it just felt like there were so many things--important things--left unsaid and maybe some loose ends hanging at the end of it. Actually, the end of it came way, way too soon and I was only half way through my notes! Whoa! We had started a little bit late and the time just seemed to fly by. I asked if I could take an extra 3 minutes to fly through the last portion of my notes so as to give us some hope now that I had thoroughly convinced them of all of our problems! Ha! It's a subject that has sooooo many aspects to it and it's just so hard to know which ones to hone in on and which ones to set aside and save for another time. I know I was blessed in studying it and I hope that the ladies were blessed by something that was shared at Retreat!

Our service that night was a little different since we had no preacher. The guy who was scheduled to preach had to cancel, so James had found a replacement. The night before Retreat the replacement called and said that they would be unable to come due to some serious family emergencies! So James handed out one or two verses on the subject of holiness to 6 different guys the first night and told them to put together a 5 minute sermonette for the next night and they could just sort of tag-team it. It was great!!! All of them had such good, good things to say and the Lord really blessed. And lo and behold, my pastor just happened to be the fieryest (it really should be a word) preacher in the whole place! Ha! It just amazes me to listen to Brother Sam. I'm beginning wonder if he'll be able to just teach ever again! :-) It doesn't matter to me whether a guy is teaching or preaching--I like both--but the Lord is just really blessing Brother Sam and his ministry and it's a regular thing to see the anointing to preach on him while he's ministering. Neat!!!

Uummm... aside from the spiritual stuff, the highlight of the second night of Retreat was the presence of a mouse. For any who may not know Tammy Kaufman very well, she is deathly afraid of mice. There happened to be one in the building and she was none to happy about it. Keven and Dustin were chasing the thing down, trying to catch it or run it out the door. It ran behind some boxes by the wall where a cardboard tube was laying. Dustin thought perhaps the mouse and run into the tube, so he kicked it to scare it out. Nothing happened, so he picked the tube up. Tammy was sitting next to Jamey and asked if Dustin would try to scare her or not. (Tammy was already beet red and shakey at the very thought of a mouse in the vicinity.) Jamey was just teasing and saying "You know he would!" or something like that. At about that time, Dustin slung the tube toward us girls. Of course, the mouse was in the tube and it came flying out the end of it...--right toward Tammy! The thing landed right next to her and there went up a mighty scream from several chairs. (Even mine! I'm not scared of mice, but everybody else was screaming and that sort of thing is just so catchy, you know?!) Even after all of our talking earlier in the day about modesty, Tammy didn't seem concerned with the issue at all there for a few moments. Her denim skirt went flapping wildly as her legs were slung up over the table and then onto Jamey's lap, or at least I think that's what Tammy said happened. I was too busy trying to figure out why I was screaming like a sissy girl. And, of course, laughing at the whole show! I do feel bad for Tammy--this is a deep and genuine fear in her and she can find no humor in it whatsoever. But it's still funny to re-enact the scene in my head! You should have seen Dustin's face. He really didn't think the mouse was in the tube (he never would have done that, if he had!) and his face was almost as great at Tammy's when the thing came flying across the room! Ha! Funny stuff. :-)

James handed out all of his info the next day and took everybody through all of the necessary information. That guy is so organized it's almost scary. He takes care of sooooo many details--little tiny things that nobody else would think of. And you should have seen the binders he gave out! They had a cover page on the front all prettied up with an index, then a map of our Region on the inside with all of our churches and missions indicated by a star or a circle. He had appointments in there and stats from this past year and who knows what all. He puts so much time and work into those kinds of things. It was really, really nice and we heard lots of comments about it afterwards. James does things in a different way than a lot of folks (like me! Ha!), but you can definitely tell that he CARES by all of those things he pours himself into for the Region.

This is getting rather long, isn't it? Time for some pictures! Here's brother Van. I've always loved him and his wife, but over the past year or two I have just felt that love and admiration growing and growing! I was sooooo thankful to be able to spend some time with them after the Retreat. What a blessing they are. And so much fun to be with!!!

As you can see, the kids got a lot out of the Retreat... ~ahem~ (This is Joe reading a comic book and Sam... just being Sam!)

Actually, the kids were soooooooo good throughout the Retreat! I dare say it's the best they've EVER been at ANY function! The only kids there were our three and Dustin and Jamey's two--and they were all just so, so, so good! Aleah is hilarious--that girl has got some of the greatest expressions I've ever seen in a kid. I think she's going to be a lot like her Mom! And Isaac sat and shared toys with my kids and they all got along sooooo well. It was great!!!

After Retreat we went to eat in Moriarty with the VanDeventers and the Clarksons. Brother Clarkson wasn't feeling very well, but they felt like they needed to make it back to Salida so they left after dinner. The Vans and us stayed at a motel there in town, then drove in to Albuquerque the next morning for church. We caught the tail end of the hot air balloons (they start flying them pretty early and it was pretty windy, so that made their flights really quick!) so the sky wasn't covered with them, but we saw several. This was taken through our buggy windshield. There's a silver balloon hiding behind that tree.

We had a really, really good service that morning--Brother V's ABM boost was excellent. Afterward we enjoyed a nice visit with them at Furr's before they headed north to Colorado and we headed south to Hatch. This is Katie enjoying the drive down there...

We had a good service in Hatch and, as always, I was sooooooo blessed by the people there and their wonderful spirit of worship. I've never been to Hatch but that I've been deeply moved by what I feel there. After the service James had a meeting with the people there and the Lord really blessed and helped in that, too. Some of the folks had brought their grills to the church and we had a cook out afterwards! That was great, too. It was so fun to be able to visit with Erika & Hector and Tayde and Luis & Keila--oh, Luis and Keila's baby is TO DIE FOR. I'm not a "baby" kind of a person and I very rarely ask to hold other people's children, but this kid sucked me right in! He's three months old and SUCH a doll. He's gorgeous. And just so happy! His whole face breaks into a glowing smile when you talk to him. Joel is his name. ~sigh~ Too, too cute.

We stayed at a great motel in Las Cruces that night, then headed home the next day. We made it to Odessa in time to meet Sam & Tammy and Sister Marcia at Johnny Carino's for Tammy's birthday dinner!

It was fun. And I did, indeed, have my three cream sodas, but I decided to go with raspberry instead of cherry. It was a good choice. Tammy said that she had had a fun birthday already, and after dinner they were headed over to Christopher & Banks for her to use her gift certificate. I went to her house today to deliver her presents from me and Mom (Mom, you got her a cute little pumpkin with "We Give Him Thanks" etched into it and a little word sign that says "Be Thankful." Just so you know. :-) She loved them both.) and I saw what she picked out from C&B. Cute, cute, cute. I'm glad she had such a good birthday.

Okay, that's enough for one night. Way more than enough, actually. Maybe I'm trying to make up for all of the blogging that I haven't been doing lately! I should get back into the routine of doing this frequently, then I won't have so much to catch up on! Oh, I didn't even tell you about today! Today I got everything unpacked and the house looking good enough to "show" if ever we need to (ha), then James brought home the new Veggie Tales, "The Wonderful Wizard of Ha's" and we had a pizza party with the kids for dinner! (This is the most unimpressive Veggie Tales they've put out in a long, long time but the kids don't know the difference, so it was all good!) James even went to Sonic and brought home Whoppers milkshakes for desert! Wow! It was great fun. We put the kids to bed and I went and soaked in a hot bath for a while in hopes that it would help my retarded neck--oh yeah, my neck! That's a whole other story!!! But I'm going to spare us all and go to bed. Just one more picture...

Spiderman, of course. Don't ask me about the pants on his head--I didn't know and I was afraid to inquire!

G'night all!

~Becki~