Merry Christmas from our crew to yours! We are thankful for 2024 and all that it brought to our family. God has been gracious and merciful to us as we hope to glorify Him with our lives and figure out our next season of life. We had more ups than downs this year and are excited to see what unfolds in 2025. John and Deanna celebrated 26 years of marriage this year and were able to celebrate with an anniversary trip through four National Parks in CA and NV. It was an amazing trip and of course urges us to travel more this coming year while we are healthy enough to hike and have more time on our hands in this short season. Other family highlights of 2024 included seeing the Total Eclipse, watching the Chiefs win another Superbowl, and spending time together all six of us at home or on vacations together a few times this year. John spent the last year continuing to volunteer with Partners Worldwide, his business mentor group, and our church, Bethel Baptist Church. He started a contrac...
So we just got back from the Piper conference in Minneapolis for our third time. Again, it proved refreshing and glorifying. We have gone all three years with our good friends, the Knorrs. The first year we took Caleb (about 5 months old) along to the conference, last year Lisa and I skipped the actual conference and went to the Mall and hung out scrapbooking and this year we took both baby boys (Jonathan - 4 months and Isaac - 2 months) and met up with an old friend who lives in Indiana - Steve Eckert (we met him back in Colorado when we all lived there). There were also about 20 people from our church there, so we spent most of our breaks talking to people or walking around downtown Minneapolis. It was a great weekend!
The boys did great at the conference and only went to the cry room a couple times (this was one of my favorite additions this year for all the sweet babies who attended - the sound booth in the auditorium where you could still be in the conference but no one could hear all the babies.) The car ride was a little harder - probably because they both sat staring at the their mommies the whole ride wondering why they were not in our arms the whole time. It made the ride pretty interesting...Lisa and I trying to watch a couple romantic comedies in the back, the two babies keeping up with each other's songs (or screams whichever ya want to call it), and the two guys in the front blaring a few sermons and discussing theology. Ya gotta love road trips!
We are already planning for next year, and what hotel we will try to stay at on Sept 26-28th 2008. John and I hope to no longer have to bring anymore babies (ha!) and are excited to see how next year's theme will affect our hearts. Feel free to check out any of the speakers we heard...Desiring God provided all the sessions free of charge an hour after they were done. They were all very good and not very long if you want to listen to them online. Enjoy, I know we sure did!
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