A Thanksgiving-To-Now Update

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On Tuesday, November 21, we made the long trek down to Duluth, GA to visit Maggie's family for Thanksgiving. It took ten hours driving through Cincinnati rush hour and some rain in the dark, but we made it in three pieces (Maggie, Patrick, and me, respectively). On Wednesday night we enjoyed an amazing Thanksgiving meal put on by Maggie's great aunt Kathryn. I enjoyed meeting new family I didn't know she even had, and catching up with some good friends, Tara and Joel Beauchamp. They are heavily involved with a halfway house for men struggling with addictions. Find out more about their faith based support ministry at http://waypoint-wingslikeeagles.blogspot.com/. It's really neat stuff.
Speaking of stuff, we stuffed ourselves that night, and then had to work it off playing some four square. My Culby 4 experience came in handy, and I dare say that a couple times I was singled out and every move (sometimes wrongly) scrutinized. But I showed them what C4 can nurture in a person, and had some great volleys.

Thursday was Thanksgiving Day and we enjoyed some family coming over to Maggie's folks (the Finchers) house for dinner. We missed Kelley and Jean-Marc, but still had  good time. Patrick is a huge fan of anything served on Thanksgiving. Huge fan.

On Monday we had an open house at the Finchers where we talked about the International Youth Group in  Costa Rica and how the Spirit is leading us to work with them. We had great feed back from the group, and though prior to that we had been fairly discouraged, God used that to lift our spirits. It's great when He does little things that He doesn't have to do for us.

After working on developing ministry partners on Tuesday, we decided to hit up the Georgia Aquarium on Wednesday.


These are actually the first fish Patrick saw in the aquarium.



Maggie and Patrick at the Grand finale
 Lots of cool memories.

On Thursday I flew to Minneapolis for some training. It snowed four inches while I was there, and got to take advantage of it: my fellow trainees and I made a bunch of snow men looking into the window of our training room. Between that and the Mall of America, our evenings were covered. Fun Fact: If you visited every store in the Mall of America, it would take you 85 hours! Noooo thanks. 

Back in Georgia Patrick was making a run for it in his super-cool Jeep walker. Check this video out!


Maggie got to speak at Clayton First United Methodist Church on Sunday, while I finished up training and flew back to Atlanta. We left Monday morning and had to dive straight in to all of the work and emails awaiting us. What a great trip!

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