Monday Ten

Heading into Christmas week, here is today's Ten.

1. Today is the last day of my week-and-a-half vacation. I had never taken that much time off, and had a blast. I think I'll do it again next year sometime.

2. I'm glad I took seven work days off. It took a couple of days just to unwind from work. Seven days has really helped me get rid of the stress that has accumulated over the past few months.

3. We didn't really do a tremendous number of things on the vacation, but the few things we did go do were wonderful.

4. My whole family got new shoes over the weekend. Rebekah got hers here in town, and the boys and I got ours in Branson on Saturday.

5. Rebekah and I celebrated our 15th anniversary last Thursday. It was the best anniversary we've had in a long time. Four out of the last five years, I have been sick, mostly with the flu. That other year, we spent our anniversary in the hospital with our youngest, who was a premmie in the nicu of a local hospital. No sickness this year made for a great day.

6. The day was made even greater by a special phone call that shared some tremendous, life changing news.

7. One of my best friends did something life changing over the weekend. He proposed to his girlfriend of three years. Congrats to Sam and Emily.

8. The boys are out of school for the next couple of weeks. I really feel sorry for Rebekah. At least she'll have me today, Thursday and Friday of this week and Friday of next week.

9. I've raised a lot of feathers on Facebook this week (as have some folks from my church) in talking about the Xmas Christmas series. I'll probably blog about it this week, but let's say for now that I understand why Christians get all upset about the world taking Christ out of the list of December celebrations. However, I think this part of the discussion is one of those missing-the-forest-for-the-trees moments for western Christians.

10. By the way, church was a blast as we concluded the Xmas series. Today was the last day for our worship pastor (good luck Jeff May). We had a record, non-Easter attendance of just over 4,400 and 47 decisions for Christ. Pastor Tommy pointed out on his blog that nearly 200 people gave their lives to Jesus over the four week series. That is totally awesome.