Mundo and Carmen Perez, their daughter Berenice, and their sons Fernando and Emmanuel. incredibly gracious hosts. sweet sweet people! we stayed with them from our arrival on thursday until Tuesday morning, when he and his father in law drove us into the state of Mexico, to the city/town of Chimalhuacan, where we stayed with Isidra and Norberto Manzano until the following Thursday morning. 

the sign says 'today's fresh chicken' ... and how! it was good to see the old carnicerias again --  

so here we are doing the pose in front of the fountain near the ... legislative palace in Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala, Mexico. more pictures to come ...  

gee... it's a rodeo ... at the hacienda next to our friend Valentin's house ... but for the life of me i can't remember the name of the town it's near ... this is the merging of three different pictures ... which i though was kinda cool.  

this was a few days ago ... that's my winter coat on my chin ... :-)  

the sanctuary of Jerusalem Church, looking all pink and beautiful!  

the view from our front yard on friday evening. pretty awesome!  

today was a good day. got the message done shortly after 1 AM, which is actually EARLY for me. came back in the morning and had to add a few finishing touches to it. interesting thing, in sitting down and reading through it again, there were parts that i didn't remember writing. hmmm ...

anyway, the message is on the emmerton messages blog linked to the right here, if you want to read it. there were a few variations from the manuscript, but not many. Leslie thought it was good. that's always a good sign. i thought when i first started doing this that she would be the person i'd go to to sound off ideas, or read parts of the messages TO to find out if they 'clicked' or not.

turns out we don't do that so much. it is a part of her worship to NOT be a part of the sermon preparation. and it turns out that it's part of my discipline of ... listening ... i guess, to not bounce ideas off people when i'm preparing a sermon. i chat online with jay or a couple of my other friends while i SHOULD be writing the sermon, but aside from a few general ideas ... or a couple of pure copying instances (thanks, jay:-)) most of what ends up coming from the pulpit is what comes together between me and God over the course of the week or couple of days while the text is "perking."

anyway ... the morning went well. after church, i ran the kids to McD's for lunch, then we all went to Farnham Manor, one of the local nursing homes, for our monthly service and devotional. Mrs Ruth Richardson, who was the oldest living WWI veteran, lived there until she passed away on the 29th of December. She was a precious soul. clear eyes, alert, not ... disoriented in any way that i could tell. she was always at the services.

i missed her today.

This evening we had our usual 'family night' supper and missions 'moment'. the program tonight was US - leslie and me- sharing what a little about mexico and what we hope to do while we're there. we're looking to build relationships with the families of the men we've gotten to know in working with the hispanic community on the northern neck.

at the end the congregation commissioned us.

pretty cool, this being a church family and all.

REALLY cool.

grace & peace

just a quick note. drove to va beach yesterday to celebrate colin's birthday this morning, and had a wonderful time at chuck e cheese's. noise and all.

christmas in the orthodox tradition was just celebrated on ... thursday, otherwise known as the feast of the epiphany. nice tie-in, with the wise men bringing gifts to the holy family.

gotta go write.

grace & peace

4 Generations: Nana (Turner), Grana (Angela Turner Maccubbin). Leslie (Maccubbin) Park and Hannah (Park). Nana is 96!

Caleb's memento from vacation. after 3 days of being housebound due to the snow (they couldn't go out because we didn't think they'd NEED snow gear ... after all, this was VIRGINIA BEACH... (sigh) ... we were out at the local playground flying his remote control plane, and i was in charge of recharging it. while i was doing that, he ran off to play on the playground, and promptly slammed into a horizontal pole and cut his eyebrow open. he looks like a boxer, doesn't he? he has 2 internal and 6 external stiches to brag about to his friends at school tomorrow. :-)  

Scott made this for Angela a few years back. Grandy has a rice-filled satin rose stem stuck in his mouth like a pipe. He passed away in April of 99. We STILL miss him terribly. 

well, we're on vacation ... and i feel disconnected. i guess in a way that's the whole POINT of going on vacation - TO disconnect. to disengage from the stuff of everyday life and relax ... refresh yourself, as it were.

what makes it odd is that, i don't really WANT to disconnect. i don't WANT to disengage from the lives that i'm involved with back home. i wonder how Cindy is doing, how William is spending his first christmas without Margaret in ... probably over 60 years, how Jack is feeling, how Jose did in his therapy yesterday and this morning, how Karen is doing - still fairly stunned at the gifts she brought over on Friday afternoon ... STILL AMAZED at the generosity of the folks at Jerusalem ...

of course, a part of me is perking the message for sunday ...

we had a wonderful sunday - went to thalia lynn, saw a lot of people we'd not seen in a long time, though not everyone - it snowed here, something fairly unusual in virginia beach - we still have an inch or two on the ground, though thankfully the roads have mostly been cleared. Hannah's 1st grade teacher came by to visit this afternoon - Louise Powell has the gift of encouragement. she is such a sweet spirit. Leslie went to breakfast with Julie, her best friend, and has left a phone tag message for donna, hopefully we'll be able to hook up later in the week.

all in all, i suppose i'll be settling into vacationing more and more as the week progresses, in time to get back into the swing of things when we get back to emmerton sometime saturday.

i'm still trying to wrap my brain around the horrible events in indonesia, malaysia, sri lanka, thailand (i had nightmares about that happening as a boy in antofagasta), and ... somalia???

O God, give us hearts and hands to reach out and lift up, and help, and provide comfort and sustenance to our brothers and sisters across the world.

so it's been ... a week and a day ...

http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2004/122004/12202004/1605450

but it WAS certainly memorable.

feliz navidad, y feliz año

merry christmas, y'all! (yeah, i know it's a little early, but with the way things have been ramping up here, i may not get a chance to post anything else before then ... WILL try to, though.)

grace & peace,
in the season of
grace
and
peace

full day ... full week ...

monday took jose into richmond for his therapy ... tuesday drove down to irvington to pick up a massive amount of food donations (relative to the size of the congregation ... 18 people) ...

then came back and drove up to fredericksburg to visit with bob and katherine self . bob has just been diagnosed with inoperable cancer ... in the lymph nodes ... there is ONE treatment option available to him ... a type of chemo ... he turned 90 this past spring ... i'll be getting up to fredericksburg a lot over the next several weeks ... it is a fast-moving cancer.

tuesday evening i got word that edna mckendrie, the mother of one of our young couple's wives, was found dead at her home ... visitation was this evening ... i've been asked to do the funeral tomorrow ... and valentin farfan, a mexican friend, is spending the night with us tonight so i can drive him into richmond in the morning so he can get on a bus to go home to tend to some legal business there and then come back and keep working ...

such is the life of a rural pastor ...

mom and dad and lolly and jacques and elizabeth rose and aaron are here ... we had 22 people altogether for thanksgiving dinner today ... it was awesome ...

gathering coming up on sunday ... here at jerusalem ...

grace & peace

it's been a while.

my first instinct is to apologize ... but i would then quickly ask ... who would i be apologizing to? :-)

let's see ... when was the last post ... oh ... almost a month ago.

since then, i've been running to ... well ... just running, it seems. all good and necessary stuff ... but running as if i had the energy of a teenager ... which i don't.

i said goodbye to uncle john parker the same week that i was called in to be with a woman who lost her baby 8 months into her pregnancy ... last week i went in to be with a couple of burn victims, arrived at the hospital to find that one of them had been medevacked (sp?) directly to MCV ... and found out the next day that he didn't make it.

got an email yesterday asking for some paperwork that is long overdue ...

got asked if i'd be willing to check into taking a public speaking course again ... by someone who has a lot of trouble hearing but won't consider hearing aids ...

and i'm having to think about going back to school in the spring???

so now it IS time to apologize ... for whining ... but i'm going to leave this here for now ... and probably delete it later.

i have a sermon to write.

this doesn't convey the energy, but it was an awesome evening in worship as well. this was right before the service started.  

this evening at coan church we celebrated another encuentro. we had 62 hispanic friends there. that is the largest number yet at a gathering - outside of Posadas last december. this picture was taken before the last big group got there.