...to be wearing SOCKS again! Wa-Hoo!!! There are a great many wonderful things about the General Assembly and only a few truly terrible things, the most terrible of all being nylons. A whole week of 'em. I have a severe aversion (just personally) to bare legs and feet, so that's not an option. By the end of the week I CAN'T WAIT to get back into some nice, cozy, comfy socks. My first choice was my blue and green and white striped ones. Today was blue and orange argyle. ~sigh~ Life is grand. :-)

The webcast pretty well took care of the need to blog about the Assembly, which is both great and awful all at the same time. I'm SO GLAD that we have that available! What did they report--like, 43 countries that had logged on?! That's AMAZING!!! Wa-Hoo! I could go through my program and write about all my favorite parts of the Assembly, but it's already nearly 11:00 and I'm way too wiped out to even consider it. So... order the DVD's and pick out your own favorite parts. :-)

I will mention the shockers at the end. Brother Carter taking over Tennessee and Brother Horton taking over Virginia. Hhmmm. Strange. I have this peculiar desire to poke fun at Brother Horton here on my blog all of the sudden. I'm going to make myself refrain though. Tonight. :-) As for Brother Carter, can you believe that man actually had the nerve to approach some of our ministers directly following the dismissal prayer and inquire as to whether they were pastoring right now or not?! I'd hate to accuse him of trying to snatch our preachers... but I guess that's what I'm doing! Ha! I know he now needs a pastor for Antioch and for his own church and he's apparently not wasting any time getting right into the hunt. I told him he couldn't have any of our pastors. Actually, what I told him was that we scraped the very bottom of the barrel when we picked pastors so that nobody else would want them and we wouldn't be in danger of having them desert us. Ha! Of course, I said it mostly for the benefit of the particular pastor I was standing next to at the time (you know who you are!), but hopefully Brother Carter got the gist. Unfortunately, he doesn't strike me as a man to be easily discouraged or deterred. I figure he'll have both churches filled by the end of this week! HA! I truly hope so, anyway. We need good workers all over The Church of God and I pray God will provide some for those churches very soon. As long as they don't come from out west. Kidding--I'm just kidding! Sort of. ;-)

The bigger shockers were Brother Campbell going to Florida/Georgia and Brian O'Dell going to Cajun country--that's the biggest WOW of all to me. And I am soooooo excited about all of them! I can't imagine how hard it must be on the Campbells and their family and church to be parted after so many years... but I'm so excited! I feel like God's going to bless ALL of them for making this sacrifice, as well as The Church of God in Florida and Georgia. And the O'Dells! Wow!!! I feel so sorry for them (I can SO relate to the jumbled up feelings Sister Belinda is experiencing right now! Ha!) but I am just so, so, so excited about their appointment. I think they are going to be a wonderful blessing to the Church there. Besides... we're neighbors now! :-) Of course, "neighbors" in regions like this means that if they locate right in the center of their region and we stay right in the center of ours, we'll be about 850 miles away from each other! That's only about, what, 15 hours?! Crazy. Anyway, I don't think they even know I have a blog, but if anybody sees them be sure to tell Sister Belinda that I've been praying for them every time I see a Taco Bell. ;-)

Well, I think I'm going to call it a night. I'll try to post more soon, including some pictures. I'm just not up to it tonight, and I'm certainly not up to wrestling with this dial-up connection to get some pictures up tonight! Until next time--we're having a great time in Pennsylvania and I'll tell you all about it soon! G'night!

~Rebekah~