With our school district going to half-days this week has played havok with my schedule, but I’ve managed to get down most of what I wanted to accomplish this week so I’m not really sweating it all the much.  Today I put down some thoughts for Sunday’s sermon and then modified a lesson from my Biblical Evangelism study to teach one of our Sunday School classes on Sunday (that ought to be interesting, as it’s the class where people go to Sunday School and then go home).  I got this done in time to head to our kid’s school so I could go on a field trip with my daughter.  It wasn’t much, just a walk to a local water ice place, but it was good to be with my daughter and her class.  She’s not had such a great experience with her classmates this year, and it was neat to see them all in awe that her dad would do something with the class.  That was cool.

After the kids got home my son and I went out behind the church building to ride bikes.  One of our neighbors came down with her son and he joined us for a bit.  He’s a good kid, being three years older and into video games my son simply adores him.  After we finished riding bikes we went to our neighbor’s house and sat on the porch with their two other children – a 1 year old and a 1 week old (both cute, the baby is TINY).  My daughter came over as well and the three kids went inside to play after a bit.  It was so nice to sit on the porch and just talk for a while with neighbors.  Suburbanites often feel isolated, and Pastors even more so, but we’ve been blessed with some neighbors that are actually craving connections.  Our block has been quite good to us this way – though it took a couple of years to be so!

It was nice to feel “normal,” which is one of the great blessings our neighbor’s afford us.