Laugh

weekly download

What a week! Here goes...

  • I had only two days in the office last week, which was definitely not enough time to do all that I needed to do!
  • We spent the weekend in a staff development time -- learning more about ourselves and each other through personality and spiritual gift assessments. VERY informational! I discovered (again!) that I'm more of a leader than I give myself credit for. More on that later...
  • Our friend Dave spent the weekend with us, and although we hardly saw him (because we were in non-stop sessions), we still managed to have a great visit. He said quite a few times how amazing it was to see how "big" we are now. Dave and Amy were on staff with us back in 2000/2001, when it was pretty much just the four of us. We've come a long way since then, and one area it's most obvious is our much larger team of staff and interns.
  • Niel made a great statement in his sermon on Sunday, touching on the matter of singleness: "Rather be in the will of God without someone than out of the will of God with someone."
  • I was reminded again of this principle: What you believe determines and impacts your decisions, and your decisions determine and impact the outcomes of your life. If we're unhappy with our outcomes, often we try to just change our decisions. If that's all we change, we still get the same outcome. We must change our beliefs. We need to ask ourselves: What are the deeply held beliefs that led me to make the decisions that brought me to this place?

Happy Monday!

weekly download

Some random snippets from my brain as I think about the past week...

  • We are getting close to the launch of our new ministry website. We had a "website preview meeting" with our creative director, and it got me really excited! I can't wait till it launches so you can see why I'm pumped!
  • We lost an entire mission team for about 15 minutes yesterday. I would've thought something like that is impossible, but we managed to do it! (Now, just to clarify -- no one was in any danger, and the team leader didn't even know we'd "lost" them!)
  • We took a mission team to a new game lodge for their end-of-trip safari. It is much nicer than the lodge we used to go to, and the team really enjoyed the experience (as did Niel and I). I'm looking forward to taking the next team there as well.
  • Last night I heard a testimony about the ministry happening by the mission team. One of their ministry groups met a man who had suffered a heart attack quite a while ago and hadn't been able to talk since. They prayed for him and ministered to him and his familymembers. When they returned the next day, the man was speaking! I love when God shows up so mightily! Not only did the man receive supernatural healing, but the team's faith was encouraged and strengthened as well!
  • On Wednesday, we drove to Piet Retief for the day. (PR is Niel's hometown, where he grew up and youth pastored before we launched Thrive Africa.) It's about a 3-hour drive each way, but it was so worth the trip. We got to spend some time visiting with friends we don't get to see very often (and we were even given an apple pie -- my favorite dessert!). It was a nice break before our travel days with the team and the upcoming week, which has us on the road quite a bit.
  • One of our closest friends is visiting South Africa for 6 weeks. He'll be coming to visit us next weekend, but we unexpectedly got to see him last night while we were in Joburg. It was so great to see Dave and spend some time with him, although it made me miss Amy even more!

That's all for now!

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morning chuckle

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I start off each morning by checking out my friends' blogs (seeing a new post makes me smile) and perusing over the various leadership blogs I read. I've got a pretty good list of blogs I read that are written by people I don't know -- church leaders who I find to be inspiring and intriguing. (A condensed list of some of them are in the links on the right...)

This post on askingY.com made me chuckle this morning. I've been guilty of a few of these myself at times... A good reminder to remain relevant -- so that our light shining in the darkness is one that attracts people rather than repels them...