Day Two

Day two on our mission trip is coming to a close. Today mainly involved getting set up on the worksite and meeting our homeowner. I am excited to be on a roofing crew. While I don't think roofing is my career calling it is a nice refreshing break for a week from the office. We have a LOT of work to get done so our crew will be very busy. The weather is cool here with hi temps around seventy. Much nicer than other mission trips. Think Mississippi in the dead of summer!! The team I am leading from Selmore is doing great. Hopefully they are ready to work tomorrow! Keep us in your prayers this week. While we are working for God and it will be a refreshing week spiritually it will be a long week physically.
Sent from my BlackBerry Smartphone provided by Alltel

Made It!!

We made it to Sioux City. Trip was very uneventful. I did get lots of rest on the way up here so that was good. Honestly I slept four hours or more!! Nice!! This post won't be long because this is a test post because I've not posted through email on this blog. Talk to you tomorrow.
Sent from my BlackBerry Smartphone provided by Alltel

In less than 12 hours...

I will be on my way to Sioux City, Iowa. My mood about the trip has turned around completely the past 48 hours and I can say now that I am genuinely excited about going. As I've talked about each trip is different and I'm excited to see what God has in store for this trip. It's amazing the work he does in the inviduals, including myself, each trip. I'm almost totally packed. For those of you wondering I did just purchase another copy of the missing book. I kept the receipt though because I'm going to look again tonight. It has to be here.

This post is short but I'm finishing up getting ready. Not sure how the posts will be for the next week. I am going to try very hard to keep up my posting every day in June but just not sure how long the post will be. Pray for us as we head out at 6:00 tomorrow morning.

Am I obsessive compulsive?

Am I obsessive compulsive? I've been told at different times in my life I am and tonight I'm having a bit of a crisis. I had been planning to take a certain book on the mission trip to read on the way up there, at night, and on the way home. Truth be told I'll get a chapter read on the way up there and never pick it up again but that is beside the point. I KNOW that I own this book and I KNOW that it is in my house but I can NOT find it. I am NOT a person who loses stuff. Whenever I can't find something I have momentary falling apart but almost always find what I am looking for eventually. There are three things that come to mind that I have spent HOURS looking for throughout my life only to never fine. 1. High school class ring. I have NO idea where this went. It went on my black and white striped comforter when I was in high school after a basketball game only to never be found again. We were so desperate we called a 900 psychic line. Yes, you read that correctly. After hours of endless searching we never found it. It was only a $50 deductible to get another one but it did not feel the same after that. It's hard to replace the original. 2. A blue lead pencil at BKD a few years ago. A few readers might remember this episode but it was on a deadline day when everything was finished that I realized that I had misplaced a blue lead pencil. Realize while it was an "expensive" lead pencil it was less than $10. I basically made the entire tax department spend a couple of hours looking for it only to come up short. I bet the time report people loved that unassigned time. 3. Wow Worship Red CD Volume 1. This REALLY bothers me. I probably spent a total of 20 hours searching my house high and low looking for this CD. I accused Sarah of taking it but she denied it, I'm still not conviced she wasn't involved in it being misplaced. I never did find that CD but I did wind up buying another copy but now I have two volume twos. Who needs that. All of those three things really eat at me that I could never find them. This book may join those ranks. I will continue to look. I'm going to run errands tomorrow and will just buy another copy if I can't find it but it has to be here somewhere. This is the type of thing that will keep me awake at night.

Just a side note I feel better. Still not 100% but much improvement. Hopefully I'll feel great at 4:00 am tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off and I head to church to load up for the mission trip.

2 Days and Counting...

Until our annual church mission trip. This will be the sixth year in a row I have had the opportunity to lead our church mission trip. Most years my job is purely administrative. Get the people where they need to be, make sure they are fed, have sleeping arrangements, and have the tools to do God's work. This year is slightly different than the past as we are participating in the Southern Baptist World Changers Program. 14 members from our church, youth and adults will travel up to Sioux City, IA on Saturday morning at 6:00 am and spend Monday-Friday doing construction work for low income and elderly residents.

Each mission trip is totally different. I have taken a group of 12 before on a World Changers trip and I've taken 40 church members to Denver Colorado and every place in between with every size group. Part of me is really looking forward to the trip this year. We are taking our 26 passenger van which I do not have a license to drive so thankfully our van driver is going on the trip and he will make the drive. Since we are doing World Changers I'm not in charge of sleeping arrangements, food, or any other aspect except to make sure our kids and adults behave. We have a great group going and I have no worries about any of that. It should be a refreshing time for me. I always feel like I get way more out of mission trips than I put in. I never understood that until I went on one. For some reason though this year to be honest I'm strugggling. I can't pinpoint it but something just isn't right with me. I'm almost scared putting this out there since many of the participants read this blog. It's nothing with the trip itself it's just all I've got going on. For starters I've got some physical ailment, nothing major just a yucky feeling the past couple of weeks with a fever at times and other cold symptoms. It could purely be a cold, who knows. I am CONSIDERING going to the doctor tomorrow just to get it checked out. It could possibly be stress related from the car drama but that should have passed. Aviator is on its way to be sold and that will hopefully happen in the next couple of weeks. Work is really busy right now too with a lot of projects going on. I'm sure it will all get done on time but it still stresses me to leave it unfinished. I also hate to leave Sarah and the kids behind for a week without me. They will survive I know but it will be rough at times I'm sure. Just an FYI on the kids I've decided on a nickname of Big Mac for Malachi. He's big, name is Malachi, and he eats cheeseburgers now, works for me. Anway I just ask for your prayers for our trip and for me that I get it in gear. I always go through the anxiety at some point and come up with a million reasons why I need to stay behind and once the bus pulls out it all goes away. I'm sure that will happen this time, I just need to make it until then. Who knows, maybe I'll sleep part of the way there?

Crisis Avoided...

Had a mini crisis inside Walgreens this evening before our softball game. Just in case you are wondering we lost and it was pretty ugly. I'm ok with it. If it's a blow out either way I chill, those close games, they get me. I do feel sorry for our intern who slid about 10 feet away from home plate and then I yelled at her to get up and crawl across home because the catcher missed it. She scored and all is well. Anyway, back to the crisis. Some of you who know me well might know that I am a germaphobe. That may or may not be the right spelling but hey, it's my blog, like it or leave it, literally. I hate germs of all kind. I have lots of hand sanitizer and am very careful about food I eat and where I drink from. I will still not drink from my own tap after living here a year and a half, I dread church dinners just because I have to try and figure out who brought what, I will only eat from kitchens I trust, and I am VERY particular about my toothbrush. So much so that when I got on long trips, specifically mission trips or our trip to Ethiopia that I always buy a pack of disposable toothbrushes. I use them ONCE, with BOTTLED water and then proceed to throw them out. The very thought of using a sink I don't know about to wash my toothbrush completely grosses me out. Well before Ethiopia I bought a lot of disposable toothbrushes at Walgreens noticing they were on clearance. We used them all up in Ethiopia, but I should have put two and two together with them being on clearance. They DON'T CARRY THEM ANYMORE. I also can no longer find brushups so I was very concerned about what to do and spent about five minutes pacing the toothrush/toothpast aisle at Wal Greens with the staff watching me. Finally I saw a pack of 6 toothbrushes with toothpaste for $5. I figured I will take those and use them the first six mornings and the last morning I will just use lots of gum. I was VERY concerned for a few minutes. I came close to spending $20 on a toothbrush sanitizer:) In my defense though, using a sink with 125 junior high and high school boys is pretty nasty by day two or three. Some people MIGHT remember the infamous Wal Mart run but I won't go into detail!

Until tomorrow...

Adam

Money Matters

For most of our married life Sarah and I haven't always made the smartest money decisions. In fact we've bought some pretty questionable things. One thing that I have always struggled with wanting new is vehichles. I have several vehicles and several nice vehicles. Two years ago I bought the first car I've owned which I can truly say has everything I could want and more and I really like. It was our 2004 Lincoln Aviator. A couple of weeks ago I took it in to Ricks Autmotive to get it looked at on a couple of issues. Mainly brakes and rotors and the transmission was shifting hard at times. They reccomended about $5,000 worth of work which included a new transmission. That's the second time I've taken a transmission issue there and have them try and sell me a new transmission. They did do a transmission flush and it's working completely fine now so I'm convinced maybe I didn't need that. Anway when we were trying to figure out what to do with the car, whether to sink money into or ditch it and buy a new car or ditch it and buy a used car some fleet vehicles came up for auction at my work. At the end of it we were able to buy a newer model, high mileage, extremely well maintained mini van and pay cash for it. We are hoping to sell the Aviator for what we owe on it and eliminate a car payment! (Getting it sold is a God send and the person helping us with it is truly a friend, one who you know will help you when you need it, those are hard to come by!) It's amazing though how we went from thinking we had to find $5,000 fast and get it fixed to deciding to trade "down" and elminate a car payment, even though I'm more and more convinced it only needed new brakes and rotors but that's another story. All in all the whole thing has taught us a lot about what is important in life. It seems like our society has become extremely spoiled with wanting the latest and greatest and that includes me at times. I've learned a lot through this, even though the canker sores from worrying are about to take me down.

Tonight I cleaned out the Aviator and took it to the car wash and vacumed and washed it all myself. Part of me was tempted to take it to Auto Magic but besides saving the money there was some satisfaction in doing it myself. (This is sounding so very strange even to me...) Sarah's agreed to drive the mini van but is struggling a little bit with becoming a mini van girl. I think she'll like it after a while and I really think we'll like it on long road trips. Don't tease her too much about it.

This was the first post of the 30 posts in June I talked about earlier. I'm hoping to spend some time on the blog this month and get it redesigned.

Until tomorrow...