Thank You

"Remember that I commanded you to be strong and brave. Don't be afraid, because the Lord your God will be with you everywhere you go." Joshua 1:9

I've noticed a pattern in my prayers. Everytime I sit down and spend time with God, I'm always asking that He provides me with strength and bravery. This is especially true each week before my client presentation. "God, I pray that you give me the strength and courage I need to get through this presentation today."

I read the verse above the other night and it really sunk in. God has already given me strength and bravery, I just need to recognize it in myself.

Rather than ask God for something, I need to thank Him for what He's already given to me.

Fetch

Our kitten Madison is looking more like a cat these days, but she is still a playful, hyper little kitty. She loves water bottle caps and will play with one for hours.

One day, I was sitting on the floor with her and I flicked the bottle cap across the room. She ran after it, picked it up with her mouth, trotted back to me and dropped the bottle cap in my lap. I said, "ok, let's play fetch!" So we did for about fifteen minutes. She loves it and it is the cutest thing to watch. We can be in any room of the apartment now, toss the bottle cap somewhere and she will go get it and bring it back. She's so smart!

Earplugs Recommended

Ask anyone and they will tell you that I cannot sing. I believe I inherited this lack of talent from the Scallen side. Scallen "Happy Birthdays" are notorious for being out of tune and just bad.

I admit, I am not the best singer, but this does not stop me from belting it out now and then. One evening I was driving to Toledo to visit Eric and I was talking on the phone with my friend Erin. We had a nice conversation and, as we were hanging up, one of my favorite sing-along songs came on - "Picture" sung by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow. I love singing to this song and I must say, sometimes I sound amazingly like Sheryl (it's all in my head). So I sang my heart out, with both Kid and Sheryl, and I finish with a smile on my face. However, this expression quickly turned to shock as I heard Erin cracking up on the other end of the phone.

See...this was my pre flip phone days and apparantly I had not properly ended the phone call. Erin heard the entire song, my horrendous singing, and enjoyed every minute of it.

Bring on the Rain!

Praise the Lord! It's finally raining! It rained all day yesterday and will continue today as well. The weathermen say we need a foot of rain to be in the clear and so far we've had about two inches, but lake levels are up and there is a lot of green over charlotte today. I don't think I've seen this much rain since I've moved down here.

It's going to be a busy weekend. Tomorrow morning, Eric and I are taking Jessi to see some preserved dead bodies at Discovery Place downtown. The Body Worlds exhibit is in Charlotte for a couple more months and we are taking her for her birthday (which was on the 24th). Then tomorrow evening we are meeting a group of friends in Monroe for dinner at 5 (before our 24 hour fast begins at 6) followed by a trip to a haunted corn maze. I'll be at church pretty much all day Sunday greeting, then our hour of prayer at the church offices and then the leadership event at 6pm.

It's going to be a long but fantastic weekend.

Dominate

We are currently in a season of domination at Elevation. We started our capital campaign last week with the church giving away the equivalent of a weekly offering - $40,000! We were instructed to take an envelope that would have $5, $10, $20, $50, $100 or $1,000 in it and use the money to bless someone in the community. I received $10 in my envelope and I paid for a woman's order at the drive thru. There have been some pretty amazing things happening this week all around the city. If you want to read some of the other ways people have been blessing back, click here.

This past Sunday, Elevation made the front page of the Charlotte Observer! The article talked about the Bless Back Project and our Dominate series. You can read the article here.

As we move further in this series and determine what our two-year commitment will be, I just pray that Eric and I will be able to put all of our trust in God and lay everything on the table for Him. In the end, it's all God's anyways.

Bye Bye Cable

Well, it happened. For a few reasons Eric and I downgraded to basic cable (broadcast & local channels only) and we are now cable-less. Of course the change did not go smoothly and we are not getting any channels right now, so this morning instead of Good Morning America I watched half of HP Chamber of Secrets. Such a great movie. I love the Weasley's.

Last night we watched Transformers. I wonder what tonight's movie will be...

Monday, Monday

It is such a Monday. This weekend was so relaxing. Eric has been sick with a cold, so aside from running a few errands we stayed in all weekend. I now have him hooked on Grey's and we are well into season 2. After a long week it is so nice to just do nothing on the weekend. We also got to see Jessi yesterday. Even though we only live 15 minutes from each other I don't think we've seen her in about a month!

Man does time fly by! Eric and I have now been married 6 months. God has blessed us tremendously and we have had a wonderful start to our marriage. Eric is such a great husband and, after three and a half years of long-distance, it is so nice to be able to see him everyday. I love you Eric!

Squirrel

We woke up this morning to find a very young squirrel on our balcony railing. We then brought Madison over to see him, but this turned out to be a bad idea.

The little squirrel got very scared and immediately started to cry and make whatever noise squirrels make; we thought he was calling for reinforcement. However, we soon figured that the little guy was scared for his life thinking Madison was going to attack at any minute. We then took her away from the window and put her in our room.

Eric then put some peanuts out on the deck for the squirrel to eat. It took him a while but he ventured over to the peanuts and had a nice big snack.

We are on the third floor of our building and there aren't any big trees close enough for a squirrel to jump to, so we were wondering how this little squirrel was going to get down. He wandered around the deck for a while, probably wondering the same thing. We eventually let Madison out of the bedroom and of course she ran right over to the window. We think this is what gave him the motivation he needed to scurry down the side of the building, because the next minute he was outta there!

Madison

Our kitten Madison is now 7 months old and she is really testing our patience. She loves to get into everything, including the kitchen sink!

To my dismay she is now able to jump onto our kitchen counters and is drawn to the faucet. She does this in the bathrooms too. She is fascinated by water. When I'm washing my hands she's right in there sticking her nose in the water. She used to hate water and getting wet. This new love is not good considering one of our discipline methods is squirting her with some water when she does something bad.

Another fascination she has is lampshades. This seems to just be a night time thing though. It seems every morning, probably around 5, she is batting at the lampshades by our bed. This of course wakes us up and she trots over thinking it's play time. If we're lucky we get another hour and a half of sleep and then she's up begging for turkey.

Despite her annoying activities, nothing beats getting into bed and having my Maddy jump up and run over to cuddle and go to sleep.

Power Outage

It's always nice when days turn out better than you had expected.

Tuesday's are normally my busy days and I tend to work well into the evening. However, today our main office experienced a power outage causing all of our networks to shut down. Since email and internet were down as well as all of our drives, everyone got to go home around 1:00.

I was able to cash in my spa pedicure coupon and man was it amazing. My feet have never been so pampered! What a relaxing afternoon.

Of course this means that meetings need to be rescheduled and the next couple days will been even busier, but I think it was a nice trade off.

Let's just see if I feel the same way in the morning.

Chimney Rock

What a beautiful weekend we had. Eric and I went to Chimney Rock, NC on Saturday for a day of hiking in the mountains. We arrived right when the park opened and made our way up to the top of Chimeny Rock. Although the morning was a little foggy, we had amazing views of the mountains and Lake Lure. We then made our way up the mountain further and hiked to the top of Hickory Nut Falls. Our hike down the mountain was also the trail where the last battle scene in Last of the Mohicans was filmed. We then enjoyed a nice picnic lunch and then made our way to the bottom of the falls. Not a huge water fall, but it was beautiful nonetheless. The colors in the rock were gorgeous and it was so peaceful to hear the sound of the falling water. By this time we had been hiking for about 3 hours and we had been up and down hundreds of stairs; it was time to go home and take a nap!

Check out Chimney Rock Park!

Gotta Start Somewhere

Well, this is my first time blogging and I'm sure it won't be very exciting to begin, but bear with me...it will get better! (I hope anyways)

I'm very happy it's Friday. Eric and I are going to Chimney Rock tomorrow morning, bright and early! This is our first adventure since moving to NC and I'm really excited about seeing the mountains.