Musings from Graceland

HAPPY, HYPER, and CAFFEINATED!

Today has been a wondrously ENFP (Extroverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiver) kind of day! After starting out the weekend so very, very sick and then having to miss the Wingard Christmas Festival yesterday due to still getting over the remnants of the bug, today was definitely a great way to end the weekend and gear up for Christmas Day!

This morning, our church had a sweet baby dedication plus it's annual Christmas musical program. We're all a bunch of amateurs and we mess up quite a bit, but it's still fun, sweet, and worshipful...even the silly parts are worship as we enjoy laughing as people free in Christ can. The whole family plus son D's friend Desmond piled on the stage to sing Some Children See Him while a slide show of kids from all over the world (including plenty of Swazi darlings) plus our church and family kids played behind us. Hubby also did a medley of Christmas carols on his Fender Stratocaster. He was nervous but we were all proud of him for stepping WAY out of his comfort zone. He did some pretty cool things with that electric guitar. Silent Night's never sounded quite the same before. The preteen girls class did a rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas and daughter A exuberantly with much joy (not) helped out with that since her sister B was having a croaky voice. Son P and Daughter LG's class sang a praise-version of Jingle Bells. And the nursery kidlets (Baby Hobbit's class) sang Happy Birthday to Jesus at the very end. Plus there were many other performances including our worship leader singing A Baby Changes Everything that had me crying.

After the service, we had a big fellowship luncheon. That's ALWAYS a hit with our family.

Then we headed into inner-city Jackson. We delivered copious amounts of warm clothes donated by friends and friends of friends, gave bracelets to some of our special friends there (including darling Miss Mary who really needs a healing for her eyes), played with little ones, saw old friends from Calvary Chapel (The Wallaces), sang Christmas Carols, listened to Amy Lancaster preach on the subject of Christmas and God-given dreams, and did lots of hugging and Merry Christmasing.

At the end of the service, it was time to get home for our church youth group's Christmas party. Our youth group is very small, but with a few extras from here and there thrown in, we had a just-the-right-size crowd and after watching The Muppet's Christmas Carol, the LOUDEST game of Spoons EVAH took place around our vintage 60's coffee table. We met two of Anna's new friends ( RJ and Jay ) took lots of goofy photos and videos, watched crazy hard rock Christian videos, and I guzzled caffeine.

Did I mention that I was hyper, happy, and caffeinated? Yeah....this was my second round of caffeine of the day. Now for some of you heavy drinkers, that's no big deal. But I usually get caffeine a couple of times in a whole MONTH so needless to say, I'm feeling pretty good and energized about now.

So you can just imagine how "blessed" my extremely introverted, peopled-out, tired hubby is feeling right now.

Aah...life is good. GOD is good. And I'm so grateful for this life that He is giving me. Even on the sick days I know He's good and I love Him. But I'm surely grateful for the days when I'm not sick and I can do what I love the most....be around people and love, love, love on them!