Wow..what a weekend..

well..it started with the fact that we now have one full time pastor on staff... then..
A long time member of our church had a heart attack and had surgery and got very sick.
Another long time member of our church passed away.
Another church family member was having surgery.

I talked the situation over with Kathy..our only full time pastor and we thought it might be a good idea for me to go to Dallas and pay a visit to our church family member that had the heart issues. Kathy was handling a funeral and going to visit our member having surgery.. First I was going to make a day of it..run up there and back...Since Donna was out of town and all I have is a hot, un-air conditioned pick-up truck I thought..hmm might be fun to go with my son and then we could take that new nissan cube.. with a/c. I also checked in with my daughter to see if she might like to have a lunch or brunch with me/us but she was busy going to Tyler and couldn't make it.. oh well..

Spoke to Austin but he had to work Saturday afternoon. I decided to get a hotel Friday night to make the trip less hard and we could bum around together a little along with making the visit to our church friend.

He made arrangements to get off work Saturday night and he thought he'd be through around 6:30 Friday and we could leave then.. sounds like a nice relaxing Saturday with my son..

A party shows up at the FUMC CLC that they thought had cancelled their party.. but I guess they didn't...so he had to stay late.. I went to FCC and moved some things around to make room for Jinx to play on Sunday morning.. I then went to FUMC to help my son move things around so he could leave..

and I didn't plan on this part...but that whole moving red padded chairs around in the gym became an amazing spiritual flashback moment for me that night... hundreds of times I moved those chairs around to set up for Upward Basketball on Saturday morning (we didn't have bleachers) and move them around again to set up for church (Center Court Service) in that same gym. A long time ago I said that gym smelled like Jesus...still does smell like Jesus to me!!

Anyway..the unplanned working late got us out of Lufkin around 9:30 and it was raining. Not fun to drive in. We stopped a couple of times to eat and to wake up etc.. of course I'm doing some twitter/fb posts along the way and my daughter calls me to see if we can have breakfast together Saturday morning since we're coming up Friday night. OK...

I finally get in bed around 2 a.m...

I'm up around 6:30 to try and find out if I had decent service at the Ex and to see if I need to be on a conf call.. and I'm groggy and not moving too fast but we finally get going and pick Hannah up around 10 and have a brunch..well really just an early lunch.. then we drop her off for a meeting she has to go to at 11 and we head back to Dallas...FYI.. DFW does not fully impart how far apart the D and the FW are.. especially in rain and slow traffic.

We go and have a great visit with our church family at Baylor... we then decide that we need to find puma shoes.. we drive around Dallas for a while and finally get to the Galleria... we eat there and the Genghis Grill and it was great. One bowl filled us up.. I know it's just a dollar more for the all you can eat but we had all we could eat.. we hang around go to a couple of stores and it looks like the puma shopping is going to be a zero.. I mean we were leaving the mall and I decided to google puma's and the finish line (which we had never heard of) has them.. we go find it and Austin gets these.

We finally head out of Dallas for L-town and drive in more rain. By the way the cube drives great..rides pretty nice and handled the crappy weather very well. We roll in to Lufkin about 9 and I find out our only full time pastor...Pastor Kathy...has the flu.. Sunday morning was not an issue..really except now I was going to have to get up earlier.. but I now had a funeral to do too. My first one ever..

Up early Sunday..wishing I was still in bed... church was great in both services. I went home and read over some notes.. put on my seldom worn suit and performed my first funeral.. it was a blessing to be there and I was glad I got to be a part of that family's celebration of life.

Then home..sat still for a few minutes then went and did music for the youth.. got done around 8:00 p.m....

and then...do you ever get so tiered and keyed up you can't go to sleep? I was up past midnight.

Ugh!!!! and when that alarm went off this morning I did NOT want to get out of bed...I drug my self out.. a little late and got to the Ex around 7.

I am looking so forward to a quiet restful evening tonight...maybe even a nap when I get home. It was a great weekend.. no doubt about it... but hope I don't have any more like it in a while. I do need a day off now and then.