First of all, I have to say how AWESOME God is. I've told several people, but I wanted to share the blessing I got Thursday; it was such a huge answer to prayer! I'll try to give the abridged version since some of you might have things to do in the next 36 hours or so (I currently have a stack of bookmarks to make...but that can wait.)

Wednesday night one of our missionaries preached out of 1 Peter 5:7 ("Casting all your care on Him, for He careth for you.") about how the Lord takes care of us if we'll ask Him--financially, emotionally, etc. It had been a really long and rough couple of weeks just because I'd been so busy. Our teen girls' Christmas party was this weekend (more about that in a minute), I'd had to reschedule a tutoring session, homeschool was a regular, I had agreed to house sit at the Brock's...well, you get the picture. Wednesday after the service I was praying that the Lord would somehow lighten my load or help me to deal with everything I had on my plate....it's commitment city around my house! Thursday I was supposed to leave work to be in Honey Creek by 4 to tutor, turn back around and teach homeschool at 5:30 on my side of town, then go back to the Brock's house to cook dinner and spend the night (remember the prayer...yes?). Hannah called at 10:30 and apologized profusely that she was sick and could not meet to tutor...I proceeded to email her and apologize that her sickness may have been God's way of answering my prayer :) My pastor's wife called around 1:30 and said, "we're home! We came on back so we won't need you to come out here and stay tonight." I was thinking, "now if I could just get homeschool cancelled I'd be good to go." I left after work to pick up a couple of things for the weekend and went to the coffeeshop to work on grading papers. About 5:15 the phone rang. My home school student's mom called and said, "I'm so sorry, but is there any way we could cancel home school for today? We just have so much that needs to be done before tomorrow." I almost yelled in the phone (but didn't...after all, said mom is pregnant and I didn't want to send her into labor.) ALL 3 things I had planned for the afternoon got cancelled and I was free to do the tons of other stuff that needed to be done. On top of that, I had planned on being at the Brock's Thursday night, so Wednesday night I had stayed up till about 2:00am getting things packed, straightened, wrapped, etc...so all of that was done already! Whoo hoo!!! I have such an incredible Heavenly Fahter that takes care of me in ways I couldn't even imagine. I'm so undeserving.

Anyway, on to the weekend. I got home about 4 hours ago from the funnest weekend I've had in a while. My girls wanted to go to the mountains for our Christmas party this year, so we rented a cabin (www.mountainlaurel.net.... imagine that cabin with 10 of us in it!) and headed out. I decided it would be fun to have a car ride scavenger hunt and compete against the other car (we had a baby caravan...I wonder if "caravan-ito" is a word...probably not.) and had great fun trying to get random pictures of people on cell phones, armadillos, and silos (unless you're Katie...then they're "stilos") (Side note...there is a guy walking around Winder, GA, still wondering why a bunch of teenage girls was practically falling all over themselves to get his picture while he was just trying to have a nice conversation with somebody...and possibly wondering if his mini-booty-shaking performance will end up on youtube somewhere.) We made a couple of new friends along the way as we rolled down our window more than once, snapped a picture, and said, "don't mind us! We're doing a scavenger hunt!" We got turned around three times throughout the whole trip, but never for more than a mile...and got there in one piece.

You should know that 10 girls + 2 bathrooms + 1/2 roll of toilet paper is a recipe for disaster. That's what we found when we arrived at the cabin. I called the guy at the rental place and he assured me that he had plenty of toilet paper in the office and that I could come pick it up (you should also know that the cabin is about 7 miles away from the rental office....) we took a carload back into town to retrieve some paper. Fun times. I tried to get him to bring it to us, but had no luck. Oh well. Over the course of the evening we played several board games (It should be known for future reference that Jesus trumps all....even in card games. It's hard to beat anybody else's card when they have the Jesus card..literally.), threw sofa cushions off the balcony so the girls could dogpile one another, and attempted to replace all of the cold water in the hot tub with hot water from the kitchen sink one pot at a time. The girls also found out that the vinyl tablecloth on the kitchen table + a pillow = a really, really fun ride down the staircase. We played sardines (remember the funnest game in the world) and tried to see how many people we could stuff in a 4x2.5x2.5 foot space....see the pictures in my album...) We had devotions and exchanged presents (my class got me a BEAUTIFUL pink bag with some smell good stuff in it....I love it!) and then just hung out for the rest of the evening. At one point I was reading through the guest book there from previous visitors to the cabin and was slightly disturbed to find comments like, "This is a great place to get naked--especially when climbing on things." and "We got butt naked, ya hear?"....from two separate groups of people.) The drivers went to bed early (well, if early is 2am) and I think everyone else turned in between 4 and 5 after watching a movie and getting in the (finally warm) hot tub.

7:30 came super early this morning and we got up, cleaned up, dressed up, and went into town to shop a little before lunch. The girls decided they wanted a western photo (one of the old timey ones) so I got to be Annie Oakley..of sorts. Who knew a Winchester was so heavy? I surprised the girls with a carriage ride (Cadillac Jack was the horse's name and he was really pretty) around Helen and the owner of the company (Horne's Buggy Rides gives a great little trip around town), Mr. Horne, kept showing up (literally---about 6 times) over the course of our buggy ride. He also informed me that if we fed Jack some food he (the horse, not Mr. Horne) would follow us home (though, after Mr. Horne followed us around Helen and stopped so many times I think maybe he was talking about himself) and that Cadillac Jack was potty trained. Yes, you read right...potty trained. Go figure.

The Dillard House has really awesome food, and we went there for lunch. They have this kind of Christmas-tree-bush-looking thing in the corner for Christmas that looks more like the forest invaded the Dillard House...the tree had to seriously be 9 feet across and never really came to a point at the top; it just kind of stopped at the ceiling. It looked like the Christmas section at Wal-Mart had just kind of exploded in the forest. Nevertheless, the food was great and we had a good time. I brought home plenty of food for 2 more meals and so did 3 or 4 other girls.

We finally got home tonight around 6 and I came home! Whew....it's been a whirlwind weekend and I am looking forward to my own bed (it's been a long time since I shared a bed with two other people, and I don't know that I have ever had to sleep in the middle. At least the king bed upstairs was ginormous.)

Anyway, the stack of bookmarks is staring at me, so perhaps I will post some pictures and then go do that. Happy weekend, everybody!!