Sunday

At church today, still in Job. It is easy to follow God when things are good, but in the bad times we can ask ourselves if it’s worth it to follow Him. God can use bad things for good and His response to our suffering doesn’t always end the way we want it to. God is God and we are not. Our response to Him in the midst of suffering should be a sacrifice of praise. It’s a sacrifice because we don’t feel like we want to or can give Him praise, but He is God and is always worthy of praise. Bad things happen to everyone, but in times of suffering we can cling closer to God and rely on Him to sustain us through it all.

Grace decorated her cupcakes for the party, then we went to the Bitsy stage for the Stonecoat woman play. It was great, the costumes were inventive, the set was amazing, it was interactive and it had a good moral – be kind and help others.

The only bad part was they don’t have A/C, so it was a bit warm in there; good thing their next show starts in the Fall.

When we got back home we got ready for the party, two friends came over, but only one family stayed. The kids played up and downstairs, then went to the park to play. James grilled hamburgers and hotdogs, we had chips and veggies, hummus and fruit and of course, cupcakes.

We got our Sunday phone call from Joel. He had 9 minutes to talk instead of the 5 like last week. He said he passed PT and the rifle exam. They earned back their shoulder patches (they gave them, then took them away, now you can tell who has been there 5 weeks and who hasn’t.) He thanked us for the letters and pictures, said that some more people got chaptered out for broken bones and told us about the spiders. He said that the DS told him to be still while crawling around and some of the spiders had crawled up his arms. One person freaked out next to him and was rolling around, but Joel stayed still, then when he got up the DS patted him down to make sure there were no spiders on him. Since we’ve seen the pictures of the tarantulas on the FB page, we already knew that he was crawling around with them, but hearing about them crawling up his arms and having to be still while they did it made us shiver. We told him we mailed his cough drops, he said they use them like money..don’t know why. He’s only got a month left, it went fast on this end….not so much on his end. Once everyone left we watched our weekly episode of Death in Paradise and then went to bed.

The week – hike, park day, TNO, insurance guys coming out, swimming in the river, youth group, masquerade ball, maybe a driving trip and Father’s day.