rambling post warning!!

the past few weeks have been so busy! i have done a lot of "scheduling posts" it makes it much easier to at least post here and there, and i suppose saves you all from reading my normal rambling posts. lol.

but alas, i have some time....so a rambling i go. ;)

i've really been busy with church things the past few weeks. a few months ago i volunteered to plan our church picnic with two of my close friends. i'm such a LAST minute planner, so it was crazy for me to plan way ahead of time...okay "way" is not true, it was about two to three weeks ahead of time that we really planned it all. it was so fun to get some "girl time" while planning and a play date to make the pinatas for the picnic...truth be told, it wasn't as easy as we thought...we had a casualty and ended up just buying them.

it was so fun to have such an opportunity to serve the church in this way. there wasn't a huge opportunity to serve at our other church, so this was so much fun. we came from a very small fellowship before and i guess maybe there wasn't as much of a need, or the need wasn't shared. i don't truly know. at any rate, it's such a blessing to be able to serve. the picnic went super well. we planned a carnival theme, complete with cotton candy, games and pie throwing. we had a silent auction as well and we were able to raise some money to put towards our building funds. our church is looking at purchasing a property and we wanted to help out towards that. i seriously underestimated the "draw" to the pie throwing, we ran out of pies before we ran out of money towards them. next time...more whipped cream!

and now that the church picnic planning is done...i'm taking a part in planning a VBS! i'm super excited about it.  i have always had a heart for teaching children. there is just something about it that blesses me beyond words that i can express. i enjoy finding lessons to teach. planning out the crafts. the songs. the everything. at our other church we were teaching every other week for awhile and even though it was mostly our kids with a few others, i loved it. a decision was made to remove the children's ministry aspect of our church a few months before we left. so we attempted to quietly entertain our five littles and get some sort of message. it was a very hard thing to do. in the end, we were not being fed at all and our kids could not handle sitting for such a long period of time and being quiet. we kept attending the church and prayed about what to do (each of us take turns skipping church and staying home with the kids, keep doing what we were doing, find a new church, etc) we attended a church after a date night. and our prayers were truly answered. i can't explain it, but when we walked through the doors and after we left the church, it was like home to us. we knew it was an answer to our prayer and have been attending since. it helped the first week we attended that we just had evaleigh with us. shaun got the  message in the sanctuary and i got most of the message in the mom's room.

i say most, because really...when we get a bunch of moms...women...in a room together, you are not going to have complete silence. but being fed whilst being in a room of women, i knew that it would work. looking back now at the season of life i was in when we first started attending the vine, i am so thankful for that mom's room. i truly was not only craving being fed the word of God, but friends. i was feeling very alone at the time. ((i also know a lot of the alone feeling was brought on by myself, not because i was truly alone)) but it was the friendships that i made while in that mom's room, that have blessed me long past my time in there. because it's only a season. after the season of a nursing baby...we moved to the season of serving in the children's ministry.

serving in the children's ministry has also blessed us so much. shaun was a bit nervous at first, but i love watching him with the kids. he genuinely gets sad when the kids in our room have a birthday and move up out of our class. it blesses me to see him as a teacher, i know he's a great daddy...and it's fun to see him be a great teacher as well. we are currently teaching the toddlers. so from about age 2 until they turn 4. it's a huge range, really. but a lot of fun! because of the huge range of age, it's hard to find a curriculum to suit it. we haven't had a curriculum for awhile, and it was starting to stress me out a bit. so i decided to plan it out. we just finished up 7 weeks of creation. we did a day of creation for 6 weeks, and yesterday they did a review. during the time we memorized the verse genesis 1:1, and the signs with it. and then a cute little song. i'm super excited to share it at church next week. just as long as i can get everyone else excited too. we teach, so i'm going to do my best to encourage them all during church and we'll see how it goes. lol.

about a month ago one of the board members of the church asked to meet with us and talk to us. as a board they decided they wanted to talk to the families in the church and get their input on the new building, children's church, etc. we were so blessed by this. it was so neat for us to see that what we had to say mattered to them, and they were listening to us. in the midst of our discussion we were presented with an awesome opportunity to pray about. children's ministry was going to be getting a new leader (actually leaders, a husband and a wife) and they wanted to also have some couples "under" them to focus on the littles, the middles, and the bigs. so we were to pray about doing that. we were so taken aback by this, in a great way. we prayed about it, and i felt it was an answer to a prayer i already had been praying. for a few weeks before that i was praying about where/what/if i should be doing something more in our church. i felt that this was an answer of direction.

and yay, praise God, shaun felt led to do it as well. because it had to be both of us, or neither of us. we met last week with the other couples and it was so nice to get together and talk about the church and children's ministry. truthfully, it feels good to feel "wanted". i'm not sure how else to explain it, but i guess it feels good to being willing to serve and for the church to take us up on it. we're so blessed by our church family. they've stood by us through some crazy things, and continue to do so, we're so blessed to have them a part of our lives.

the friendships we've made in the past year and a half have really grown us so much. without these loving friends coming up along side of us, it would've been a lot harder to get through things. and planning the church picnic, VBS and other things...are so much more fun when you're doing it with people you love, and love you. :)

so yeah. this post was all over the place. but it felt good to ramble on. if you've made it this far, congrats. now go get yourself a snack and have a good day. :)