Christian Momma

So last week we had quite a bit of excitement around here!

On Monday, the tornado sirens were going off.  The storm moved through, but no tornado, just a lot of high winds.

Then on Wednesday night, we had tornado sirens going off again around 6 pm.  We have group at our house at 7 pm, so we were a bit worried, but watching the news stations, we saw that the storm moved to the North of us.  After group was over, I watched the news and saw that another line of storms were heading this way, so I went ahead and stayed up to watch the news.

As I was laying there, around 12:30 am, the newscaster stated that “the chance of a tornado is minimal”.  So I started to get comfortable in bed.  Just then, we heard this HORRIFIC noise and Kevin shot straight up out of bed…we went running up stairs to get the boys into the basement.  Once we finally got down there, we waited for Kevin to finally get the dog to go down.  He had peeked out the window before heading downstairs and told me that our table outside (that has 4 big tiles in it) was flipped over.

After the storm had died down, we sent the kids back up to their bedroom, Kevin and I headed outside to take a look at the damage.  Our grill had been flipped, our table flipped, chairs scattered all over, out front, we saw the news crew driving through, ambulances coming into the development, and some siding in our front yard.

The next morning, Kevin called to let me know our chair was across the street and we should go get it.  Here are some photos of what I saw once the sun was up!

Our Grill

Our Table

Our Neighbor’s play set with a gutter wrapped around it

Can’t see it well, but there’s a lot of debris over by the fence

The street near us.many trees down, lots of damage

A neighbor’s damaged roof

Another neighbor who had damage and people out fixing it

A flipped over car

Same debris that I tried to show you from my yard…it’s from the next photo’s house!

House lost most of the 2nd story!

The national weather service decided that a F1 tornado had hit our neighborhood.  Now why they didn’t sound the sirens during this storm, we have no idea.  Had this storm hit at a different spot, we could have lost so much.  All 4 of our boys were upstairs sleeping when this hit.  I just Thank God for our protection during this storm that came out of nowhere!

I am on the 31:30 Women’s Ministry team at The River Church.  We just had our retreat called “Freedom in Obedience”.

We had 3 speakers (women from our church) speak on different aspects of obedience.  Freedom in Obedience, Daily Obedience, and Blessings of Obedience.  All 3 of their talks were wonderful!

On Friday night, we had dinner, then after dinner was Worship time and then our first talk entitled “Freedom in Obedience” we heard about how to hear from God, that we can gain courage and freedom from sin through steps of obedience, and how we will “make it right”.  Most of the teaching was from 1 Samuel 3.

After a time of discussion we had a game night.  The first thing we did was an ice breaker game…all the ladies stood in a circle and a stuffed animal was thrown from the first person to another then to another.  The one thing you had to remember is the person you threw to and the person who threw to you (always the same 2 people).  As it went on, they would add more stuffed animals until we had a good 10+ animals flying.  I’ll say that there was a lot of laughter!!

Then there were 2 other main games going on, Bingo and Bunco.  Of course we had other games, like Apples to Apples, decks of cards, and a variety of other games for the women to play until they were tired.

The next morning, after breakfast, we had more time of worship before going into our next talk called “Daily Obedience”.  We learned things that can keep you from being obedient to God, like fear, lack of time spent in prayer and reading God’s Word, and complacency.  We learned why we should be obedient, what the result from being obedient was.  Our speaker sited many verses out of the bible during her talk.  A couple things that stuck out to me was “God is calling me to be obedient today…not 5 years from now”, and “Define yourself by Jesus and who he says you are”…meaning I am a Princess, a Child of the Most High God.  Also to “Choose life in all the decisions you make”.

After some discussion and a break, we went into a Panel talk,  our 3 speakers were part of the panel and questions were written on cards and placed in a bucket prior to break.  We had our MC asking the panel the questions (all anonymous) and they each had a chance to answer the questions our women had.  This takes the pressure off of the women having to speak up during a Q/A time on their own to ask the questions.

After a break and lunch, we came back in to our last talk of the weekend called “Blessings of Obedience”.  Again our speaker sited many verses throughout the bible.  We learned what blessings looked like, the power we have when we obey and so much more.

Overall it was such a great experience.  Many of the women I talked to really enjoyed the retreat.

I want to publicly thank all those ladies who helped make this retreat happen, you know who you are!

I cannot believe in 15 days, Daniel and Andrew will be joining their class on the stage to graduate from Preschool.  They are so excited to be graduating too…they keep singing their songs all day.

They’ve learned their ABC’s, their numbers, and so much more!  This summer we are going to work on reading…hopefully when they get into Kindergarten they will at least have their sight words down.

In March, I signed Michael up for High School…I just can’t believe that!  (oh and the twins were signed up for Kindergarten 2 weeks later…who does that?).  My boy will be in high school!  After looking over all of his schedule, we decided to have him take a class online this summer to free up one of his periods for Spanish.

As for Noah, he’s been working so hard on his reading this year.  I have seen a lot of improvement!  He’s going to be going into the 5th grade next year.

When did my boys get so big?  When did they grow up?