The Adventures of Patrick and the CC Ladies!

I am obsessed with blogging. I'll admit it. This is my sixth post in 3 days. I think I can officially label myself as a "blogger addict." (I could be addicted to much worse things, don'tcha think?) .... Alrighty ... well for my sixth post in the same weekend, I'm finally gonna post about a little guy that I introduced you to about a month ago. .... Yep, I'm talking about Patrick .... Patrick the Persimmon, whom I met (and helped create) at the Calvary Chapel Ladies Retreat last month. I've been meaning to post about him for a long time and haven't gotten around to it. Too many ideas rolling around in this brain, I think! ;) ... I was talking to a super great lady at my church this morning, Kelly Atkinson, who led the Calvary Ladies Retreat last month ... and she asked about my blog! Yeah! She said that someone told her about my Patrick post (Sweeet! Word is getting out about my blog!), and she wanted to check it out. So ... that clenched it! From that moment on, I was determined to finish my story about Patrick - today! So ... without further ado ... this is what Patrick and the ladies of Calvary Chapel did at the CC Ladies Retreat back in the middle of October. :) Get ready! This'll be the best thing you see all day! :D

This is where Patrick and the ladies spent the weekend ... a "quaint" little camp down in Oolitic, Indiana. :)

In case you haven't met Patrick (in case you missed my introduction of Patrick a month ago) ... This is Patrick the Persimmon ... the short version is that Patrick was created in a game that the CC ladies played on the retreat. Yep ... he is a persimmon with screw legs, pebble eyes, a pine mohawk, and he flies around on a wild turkey feather.

This is Patrick with our coolio speaker, Michelle Lampton. She is an extraordinary woman who has overcome crazy obstacles and all the while kept her eyes and heart stayed on her mighty Jesus! She talked to us about being "Beautiful Warriors" for Jesus ... and reminded us that no matter how tough our lives get, God is calling us to "stay at our posts." We are NOT to abandon the talents and callings and responsibilities and people God has placed in our lives! Great messages that weekend - fo sho!!! :D

Patrick and our worship leaders, Cheryl and Tiff! :) .... Worship must've been pretty impactful for Patrick because on the last morning of the retreat, someone wrote a ransom note for Patrick. No joke! Someone STOLE Patrick ..... but one of the ladies found him later with a note attached to him that said, "Take him back! He won't shut up! He keeps singing 'Jesus loves me' over and over and over!" So Patrick was returned to us. .... Yep. God can even impact a tiny little persimmon man.

We had lots of down time during our weekend getaway, and there were prayer stations set up all over the camp. Many of the ladies took several walks of silence and solitude throughout the weekend ... and some stopped at the prayer stations to focus on specific aspects of prayer. ..... Patrick also took some quiet time away with God, to read his Bible and pray. ;)

There was lots of time to fellowship on the retreat. We chatted for hours, played games together, broke up into small groups after sessions, and did "get to know you" activities. Patrick even made some friends ... Gilbert the Grape and Mr. Smiley. :)

We played a "get to know you" game on Friday night after everyone arrived. The idea was to take a handful of M&Ms, and for each M&M color, we shared different things about ourselves. Green M&Ms were our favorite foods, red M&Ms were our hobbies, orange were places we wanted to travel, brown - embarrassing moments, yellow - our favorite movies, and blue was anything scary/exciting/fun fact about ourselves that we wanted to share. .... And believe me! There were some pretty scary stories ... mostly about .... poop. ..... And you think I'm joking! I have never heard a group of people (a group of LADIES!) talk about poop as much as we did that weekend! No joke!!!!!!! We were worst than Jared Wade on a good night!!!! It was hilarious! (So much for being "ladies," huh?)! Ha ha ha!

It's too bad Patrick ended up eating all of his M&Ms ... we didn't find out much about him.

One of the yearly traditions at the retreat is cooking meals together. Saya, a super fun, mom-kind-of-figure in my life, and I cooked some amazing cinnamon french toast and tons of yummy sausage on Saturday morning. Patrick was pretty excited about cooking too ... except when we cracked jokes about persimmon pudding. ;)

Patrick and I agreed that sitting by the fire with all the ladies was one of the best parts of the weekend. It smelled like a campfire in the retreat lodge all weekend! (My favorite smell in the whole wide world!) .... It was ggrreeat! :D

Ha ha ha! Patrick the Persimmon. He was definitely the highlight of the ladies retreat for me. Heck! He's a persimmon man! If that isn't entirely hilarious and completely laid back (two things I LOVE being!), nothing is! And what made it so great is that every single lady on that ladies retreat ... all 17 or so of us, got a kick out of Patrick! EVERYONE joined in on the fun! Like I said earlier ... Jenny Freouf, a fantastically hilarious and fun woman from Calvary, decided to plot a kidnapping just to get me all worked up! Patrick was my little buddy, afterall. ;) It was hilarious! I think I can post the ransom notes here .... let me see. They are too hilarious! ...........

And the kidnapper pleading with us to take Patrick back ...........

It was entirely too much fun!!! Everyone on the trip played along with this crazy-fun ... well .... craziness! It was a blast! We laughed together! We worshipped together! We learned more about God together! We ate together! We talked together! We loved on each other TOGETHER! ..... Togetherness! ........ It was a really great time!

And many of you who read this blog .... you are Grace ladies. Don't ya think you all should join us next year??? With all the coolness of the amazing Grace ladies and the awesome Calvary ladies ... maybe we could make new fruit buddies next year! ;)

ENTIRELY TOO MUCH FUN! ..... Yay for Patrick the Persimmon and the Calvary ladies! :)

Patrick the Persimmon

Hey, everybody! Let me introduce you to Patrick! ....... Yep ... Patrick the Persimmon!

Patrick is the creation of all the ladies who went on the Calvary Chapel Ladies' Retreat last weekend. Yep, I was there too!

I will tell you the story behind Patrick right now, and then I'll share all of my adventures with him in a later post. Get excited! This is one of the greatest stories you'll ever hear! :D

Alrighty ... sooooo!

I and probably 17 other ladies from my church headed to the Indian Creek Camp and Retreat Center down in Oolitic, IN (it's down near the Bloomington/Bedford area) last weekend to get away from the crazies of this life. It was a great time to relax, laugh, get into the word, pray, breathe in the crisp, October air, be convicted by the Holy Spirit, and be encouraged by great women of God. It was a marvelous time! ................ Little did we know that a little man would be joining us on this all-ladies retreat. ;) He turned out to be one of the highlights of the weekend for all the ladies on the trip, and it was a hilarious time! :D

So ... the story of his coming into existence is as follow .................

One of the events we got excited about on the trip was The Amazing Race. If you've seen it on TV, you'll know what I'm talking about. :) So ........ our super cool leaders (the ladies who put on the whole retreat) made up a series of activities to complete in one hour. The team to get the most activities done successfully by the end of that hour won cool prizes! (My team won!!!! And I got a cool "God Journal," as I'm going to call it!) .... Well, one of the activities was to take pictures of random objects. We had a list of objects written on a piece of paper. The list had several items on it .... like metal, a turkey, pine, a hat, the color purple, something heavy, a flying object, a persimmon ..... things like that! And the more things you could get into one picture, the more points you got! So!!! Guess what my team did!? We made a little persimmon man!!!! Yep, take a look at Patrick! He is a PERSIMMON! He is riding on a TURKEY feather. He has a stem that we called a HAT. He has PINE sticking out of his head. He has METAL screws for legs. And what you can't see is that we had a lady with a PURPLE shirt make him FLY over a HEAVY block. YESSS!!!! We had half of the list in ONE picture!!!!!!!!! Needless to say .... my team won. And it's all because of Patrick!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, by the time The Amazing Race was complete .... everyone on my team had grown too fond of Patrick to just throw him out in the yard .... how could we do that?! He was our new little friend! So we took him into the lodge and set him on the counter. Later that afternoon, I thought that the story of Patrick would be a great blog post! So I took a picture of him, and I was ready to go at it! ... It wasn't a minute later that a super fun lady from my church, Cheryl Huffman, told me I couldn't just take a picture of Patrick .... but I needed to take pictures of him DOING things! Soooo! That idea began a spiral of super fun pictures! Patrick ended up doing all of the things we did on the ladies' retreat. So ............... (yes, I know I say "so" a lot) in a later post or series of posts, I will show you guys pictures of Patrick the Persimmon undergoing all of the activities that we did on the amazing Calvary Chapel Ladies' Retreat!!!

So stay tuned! You don't want to miss this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My Second Church Family

Wow!!!!!!!!!!!! I am so INCREDIBLY blessed!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Body of Christ is probably the most amazing thing ever! God really knew what He was doing when He called us to come together to worship Him TOGETHER, seek Him TOGETHER, grow more in love with Him TOGETHER, and love on each other TOGETHER! And what I'm so excited about is that I don't have just one Body of Christ ... I have TWO!!! Granted, the Body of Christ is a universal thing ... all Christians everywhere are apart of the Body of Christ ... but I'm talking about the local Body. We each have a church home ... a place where God CALLS us to be apart, to serve, to love, to grow ... (And yes, Ben Nilsen, I AM CALLED TO CALVARY CHAPEL! ... Ha ha!). *A side note (as always!) ... Ben and I were talking at lunch today after church, and when I told him how I am called to Calvary, he told me I wasn't ... that he had talked to God and that I was really supposed to be at Grace. Goofball. Sheesh! ... Ha ha! I LOVE Grace Fellowship! I would not mind a bit if God called me there someday ... but for now, I'm confident in my calling at Calvary. But anyways! Let's try to get back on track! ... So we are all called to specific places in the Body ... we all have a local Body to be apart of. I am called to Calvary Chapel, and the people of Calvary are my church family ... it is my church home ... for sure! But what I love ... is that Grace Fellowship is kind of like a second church family. :) I have served and loved and been apart of this great church, even though I don't go to church there! The families at this place are amazing! Truly loving and seeking the Lord ... full of encouragement and love ... and it is a blessing to be a "member" of this Body.

I went to church at Grace this morning .... Pastor Warren was preaching on Psalm 73, and the last few verses of that Psalm are one of my all-time favorite parts of scripture ... and something I REALLY NEED right now! Didn't want to miss it! And Ben was bringing his friend Megan, and I wanted to meet her. And! We (my Grace folks and I) were hanging out this afternoon ... good reasons to go, right? So I walked in, and I knew nearly everyone! That is pretty amazing when you know most of the people in a church and you don't even go there!!! I said hi to Frank Bennett ... a fun guy who calls me "mom" and "Miss Safety" all the time - you'll have to ask me the story sometime. And I talked to Jeremy - right up there with Pastor Mike on the best youth pastors ever list! And I got a hug from Cindy and Kim Svoma and Pam. Pam told me she had been thinking and praying for me! What a blessing! And Marty came up and talked to me ... really caring to know what was happening in my life. :) And I got a smile from Kayla ... the cutest girl ever! And Judy Nilsen came right up to me and gave me a hug - a hug just for me! And I got a hug from Warren. And I had a good conversation with Sallie. ......... It was just a really great morning! And then lunch with my Grace folks was great! I got to sit and talk to Alec, someone I think is super great but never get to talk to ... and Ben turned from his table to give me a hard time ... always a hoot! And James Nilsen spit a spitwad at me! And Jared shook my hand. ... So yeah ... that's a long list of blessings from Grace! It was a muchly needed (yes, I know that muchly isn't a word ... but I think it is a spectacular word!) boost. A boost from my second church family!

Sometimes I marvel at how God's grace is poured into my life ... how He can (and does!) bless me the way He does. The friendships, the mentors, the encouragement and support that He pours into my life through the PEOPLE He has put in my life is beyond amazing! I have TWO church families ... it really doesn't get any better than this!!!! I love you, Grace folks!!!