On October 31 we had our FSFA fund raiser. If you know us at all I'm sure you knew about the fund raiser, we plastered info about it on every form of electronic media we could find! We had a good turn out, raising $6,140. Granted, it was not the $80,000 we were shooting for, but we knew that was a very high expectation! We are grateful to those who helped us out, and were very surprised by some very large gifts from some unexpected people. God always uses the extraordinary to bless us. If you would like to be counted in the FSFA tally, it's not too late! Let us know you're interested in giving, and we'll be more than happy to help you do that!
If I can remember correctly, we were supposed to paint the exterior of our house the first weekend of November. However, it rained cats and dogs in Abilene so that plan was debunked. However, I still put Matt to work and we painted quite a bit of the interior of our house. Bane helped too, rubbing paint into the walls and catching drips of white paint on his back before they could hit the floor! To be honest we might not have even painted that weekend...but who's really keeping track?!? We painted sometime, so it might as well have been then.
The next weekend we traveled down to Halletsville to visit the land that my dad and stepmom own. We worked on the land, and got to hang out with my middle nephew Andrew. I am always amazed at how God is very real in his life. It's really exciting to have conversations about God with him! On that Sunday we traveled to Bastrop to enjoy about an hour of my oldest nephew's eighth birthday party. We got to watch him play with his friends, and enjoyed seeing my youngest nephew for a little while. My sister and brother in law gave us a lot of stuff to sell in our next garage sale, which was a total blessing. My sister also loaded us down with queso and chips for the road. Queso and chips in the car...not the cleanest snack!
This past weekend Matt and I planned to replace the facia on the front of our house so that we could start to paint the exterior (start counting how many times I've mentioned painting the exterior of the house). For those of you who, like me until this weekend, don't know what facia is, it's the wood that hangs down vertically from the roof of the house. It's kind of an accent piece. Anyway, we pulled off the facia, and low and behold, half the succotash behind it came off. It's not really called succotash, but it does begin with an s and I can't ever remember the name! Anyway, that meant a second trip to Lowe's and more time pulling down bad wood and trying to replace it with good wood. Matt said we were doing Jesus work (carpentry). I'm glad Jesus loves me no matter how bad I mess things up, because I am no carpenter! By Sunday night we'd gotten about half done of what we needed to on the wood, and had not painted. Maybe next time. Today an awesome guy from our house church came and spent a good bit of the day with Matt helping him finish up the job. Travis, I owe you one!
A lot more has happened in the past few weeks, but I'll save that for another time. For now, I just wanted to let you know why I've been off the radar.
