Easter went well despite

my gloom about all the families being gone! We had 93. Sweet! Last week we had 71. Husband calculated that if every regular attended (regular meaning 2x a month) we could have 105 attend! Maybe one day, it will happen!

A few frustrations, I must admit, with Easter....

and holidays in general!! Why does EVERYONE have to go out of town for every holiday?? Grrrr!!! What's really frustrating is that we had a few people tell us we need to do something great for Easter, something big, egg hunt and all. So, I said sure - go ahead and plan it! Well, now the 2 families that were going to plan it will be gone. Another 2 families in our praise team will be gone, as well. Easter will feel so blah. Anyway, instead of fighting this mass exodus out of our area, next year, we'll do everything for Palm Sunday. Then, just get by with Easter service on Sunday. We had an inkling we'd have to do something like that. Church planting is definitely a 1 step forward, 2 steps backwards kind of ordeal! And that's a GOOD year!

An unexpected way to get new people into the church...

We are a part of an organization that does temporary foster care. We are the family that the children in emergency situations go to first, before anything can be decided about permanent residence. So, two girls came to our house (11 and 12). They were sooo sweet! I just loved having them because being the mother of 3 sons, well, I miss having girly issues! It was everything I would've wanted. I had to help one of the girls with shaving her legs for the first time, lol! We went to a ladies' candle party and they had a blast!

Anyway, the girls live right in our area, and have moved back under their Dad's care (he had to be hospitalized and they JUST moved to the area 2 weeks ago, no near relatives). They stayed with us a little over a week. BUT now, the Dad works (no wife), and the girls can't be left alone after school, so our family and other families in our church are going to help out with having them stay until Dad gets home from work. Their family is thrilled that after we connected so well when the girls lived with us, we will still get to see each other. And the Dad is thrilled that now he knows some people! We are also amazed how God set it up so that his girls ended up with a pastor's family, where he'd automatically get connected with people who could help him out! Seeing this kind of thing is sooo exciting!!

What makes me laugh is that the majority of our church families live in the exact subdivision that they live in (which is different from ours, lol). So, they will have plenty of help near them. And here, I always wondered why we had so many families from that subdivision attending our church, lol!

Btw, our numbers in the past 6 weeks have been over 70. Last week, was the lowest 71 - with it going as high as 86.