A Brand New Year; A Brand New Day

I do apologize for my slacking on keeping up with this journal. But life has been very busy since I last wrote, but I have a few moments during my break.

For an update: Christmas was unusual, but great this year. We celebrated with all different sides of the family, thus making many celebrations! Though all fun and grand, I think my favorite was just being at our home in Florida, with my parents, siblings and nephews just being together, reading scripture (and hearing Caleb recite Luke 2 :-) and giving gifts. We did have a great trip up to Indiana and Kentucky, but no snow :-( Apparently, a day or two after we left, of course, it snowed. Oh well. Some highlights were: seeing my grandma's reaction when I gave her my gift, multiple trips to Starbucks, Chris Jessee (enough said, haha), Making fun of Alli's "thunder thighs" (please don't be offended by this, it's a long story), late nights at the hotel hot tub, walking through downtown Nashville, making (or watch) Stephanie laugh so hard that she has to pee, driving aimlessly around Evansville with Chris and Steph, spending time with the Lord, seeing what a fine young man my little cousin is becoming, Well, just spending a week with my best friends! This was a fun trip to be sure.

The Metro New Year's Lockin was a blast. Much different from last year, atleast for me. I don't know why exactly, but it went by so much faster. We had a large representation of our youth show up, which made the event special for us Gainesville people (haha, poor Metro, having us crash their party). The Gilly's played. About 7 or 8 of us girls decided to have a time of prayer to just interceed for the new year and for each other, it turned into an hour and a half of the Spirit of God falling on us, what an incredibly sweet way to start the New Year! I am so grateful for God's kindness to us! Games were played, pictures were drawn, pizza roles were eaten and movies were watched. Follow that with sleeping all the next morning... it was a great night!

Enough of that.

For our church, 2008 really will be a "new" year in the sense that it is the beginning of something we've never experienced before. Lord willing, we will get our Certificate of Occupation for our building today or tomorrow. God's blessings to us can not be doubted! We are so grateful. We've had different teams going out to set up, and clean and such this week. Tonight the singles group will be out there. I can't wait to see how God uses this tool in and through us for now and time to come. Our grand opening is suppose to be the last weekend in January, but before that, we have scheduled: a wedding and first Sunday this weekend, and a regional men's retreat next weekend. I can't do anything but thank God when I think about it.

For me, I am hoping that 2008 will be different for me. Every year for the past few years have been very different, and very good times of growing and of change. But this year I feel the need to reach a new level, to grow up. I pray that I can grow spiritually this year, but also to establish a more organized life style. I spent the last few days of winter break totally reorganizing and rearranging my room. And, somehow, I've managed to keep it really clean since then! I hoep to grow in time managment skills, to not get behind on home work, to more effectively serve my mom around the house, and make as much time as I can to serve the church. That is my prayer this year, that I'd be less "me centered" and become more selfless. Oh Lord, let it be!

Here are a few pictures I took Saturday at the building.

Here's a view of the stage from the crows nest.
(we'll be getting all of our drapes and our grand drape next week)

Here's Alli testing out the phones.

Beautiful Chairs.

Eric playing with the new lighting board!

Stephen Courson as a silhouette.

Well, that's all for now. Be praying for our church as we enter this new season of life! I think God has a lot in store for us this year.