NYE 08

This year, we spent New Year's Eve with friends from the Appalachia Service Project...as we have done for the last decade. This was the first year that we attempted to make the event family friendly. We rented two cabins in east Tennessee and one was the family cabin for the three of us who brought babies for the first time. See Myles playing with sweet Olivia. We had a lot of fun, and the older we get the more we appreciate these friends who have known us for all of our adult lives and continue to keep us in their lives through the good and the bad.

Although we didn't get back in time for it, our church did a beautiful thing on New Year's day. There's a homeless woman who often comes in to our office to get warm, and she called the church on December 31st wondering whether she could come in on New Year's day, because the weather was supposed to be very bad and all the day shelters are closed for the holiday. My colleague Joe did some calling around and discovered that the day shelters were indeed closed on New year's day. So he sent an email out to our congregation proposing that we host as many folks from the streets as could fit in our friendship hall and provide heat, food and hot drinks, and fellowship. 50 volunteers from our church showed up, and 100 folks came in off the streets, some of them picked up by a member of our church who drove around town and brought folks who were exposed to the elements to the church in her car. Some really good things came out of all of this...an article came out about it in the front page of the Citizen Times, a member of our church went down to the Rescue Mission and took two of the guys out to eat who helped out in the kitchen to thank them, and then two women who were traveling through town stopped by the church today and felt called to write a large check after reading the article in the paper. The weather here has been frigid. We've had two snow days in a row, though I hear it will get back up in the fifties over the weekend. I can't help but think about all those folks who live on the streets and my heart goes out to them. Anyhow, just thought I'd share this experience our church had, we may consider making this an annual event since all the day shelters are closed on new years day.

Hope all of you had a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and wonderful New Year's!!