Road Trip: Family, Church and Driving

Where do I begin. This will probably be a long blog just because I have stories to share. Our family come to Springfield, Ma. to start a church. We have hit some bumps in the road but are still determined. Anthony has a heart for evangelizing and we both have a heart for the lost (the unsaved). As you can tell from previous blogs we are really liking it here. This city is beautiful in pictures and to look at but in reality it is one of the top 10 dying cities in America. There are so many churches here that don't want to reach out. And when we tell people where we moved we have recently been getting "Why New England?" as a response and definitely more comments about Springfield. But we have to follow our hearts and the man up stairs (God) is in charge. And if we are not serving and following Him the way we feel we are suppose to, then what are we doing here, and how can we expect our girls to.
So to the point. Anthony has been listening to Mark Driscoll's podcast for a couple yrs. now. If you don't know he has a huge church in Seattle, WA. and has helped our marriage, and views on a lot of things relating to the bible. His church has a program, if you can call it that, called Acts 29. That helps church planters and plants churches. They do A LOT of research on the people applying and ask you to go to different things to make sure you are called to church plant and to be able to see if they feel they can help you. We felt we needed their help and believe in them and all that they stand for. So that was the main reason to take this road trip. We decided after filling out all the papers and question that were needed, that we had to go to a conference and assessment. The hard thing was what are we going to do w/ our kids. Luckily there was one in Raleigh, Nc. which happens to be (what we thought) 6hrs away from Anthony's brother in Tenn. So we asked them if they would watch the girls and of course they said yes. So then we decided to make a full vacation out of it and visit their family also.
We left Saturday after Anthony got off work around 7pm. we drove through the night and got to Hartsville, Tn around 9:30am. Anthony drove most of the way, thank the Lord he can drive for a long time. We also had another great surprise when we got there, Anthony and Gabe's really good friend Donnie decided to come down the day before we did and left on Tues. afternoon. It was really nice to see him and the boys enjoyed talking Bible talk like they always do. So we pretty much just hung out and let the kids reunite and Charlie and Averi got to meet for the first time. It's really cool they have a 7yr. old, Kiera that Alexa attached to as soon as she met her. A boy 6wks younger than Alexa, Jaydon and a little girl Averi that's 2 mo. younger than Charlie. So they all had fun together, of course there was the occasional fight but they got along for the most part. It felt like we had 2 sets of twins in the house. That was the first time I got to see Averi since she was born so I ate her up as much as I could. On Mon we drove to Nashville to this huge mall and the kids ran around and then we ate dinner there. Tues. after Donnie left we had to get on the road to Raleigh. I didn't really wanna leave my babies so we left around 5pm or so, thinking we would get to Raleigh around midnight. To our surprise we got caught in traffic for like 3 hrs. we thought there was a car accident but come to find out people just stopped as soon as they saw it was starting to snow. It honestly was barely snowing but to people in NC. I guess that was a storm or something. So we sat there forever and ended up at our hotel at 6:30am. w/ only enough time for Anthony to take a quick nap and me to get ready. Oh yeah! We discovered that I'm not really a good navigator and mapquest stinks sometimes. Once we finally got to Raleigh we got lost for another hr. trying to find our hotel.
We had a great time during the conferences and met a lot of people doing what we are trying to do (pant a church) or have already done it. Anyway. We even got to go out to dinner on Thurs. night w/ a gift card that we got for Christmas. Our anniversary is coming up so we thought we'd use this time to enjoy being away from the kids and treat it as our anniversary even though we had meetings and thing to go to. I made the mistake of calling Alexa on Thurs. night to say goodnight. Alexa can get really weird if she is left w/ people to watch her for awhile. So I wanted to make sure she was behaving and doing ok. As soon as Vanessa put Alexa on the phone and she said ,"hi." I started crying and had to give Anthony the phone. It's weird I knew I'd miss the girls and maybe even be sad to hear their voices. But I didn't think I would break down like I did. I know we need time alone and that I complain that I want time alone. But the truth is that I love them so much, just to be away from them makes my heart ache. I did get it together and said goodnight and decided not to call again.
Then Fri. morning came and it was time for our assessment. We had to sit in a room w/ 3 guys and 1 of the guys wives. I'm not good in those settings. I get very nervous being on the spot and them asking me questions. They were very nice but it's just intimidating so of course I cried 1/2 the time, but just from my nerves...weird I know. They gave us there opinion and they will be sending out a more detailed letter saying what we need or what they thought, etc. but basically they told us that they felt we were called to start a church, we needed to move very slow since Anthony doesn't really have help (or a mentor), plus Springfield isn't the city where you can just walk around and find Christians or growing churches that want to help (like Temecula). Like I said before it's one of the top 10 dying cities. But they are willing to help us mostly w/ a mentor (we think) and anything we may need. Please just keep us in your prayers that God may send people and save people. That we may serve Him and never get discouraged.
So we went back to Tn. Fri. night. It only took us like 7 hrs. this time. We rested for the rest of the day. Sat. we decided to go to Vanessa's mom's house. She wasn't home but she has a lot of land w/ a bunch of animals which I thought Alexa would enjoy. I think she got scared of the little pigs running around. She is usually all about animals and feeding them. So the kids just ran around the yard and played inside. Sat. night we went bowling and had a lot of fun. For the first time EVER I won a game of bowling. I scored 150 or so. I don't know how but I was happy. The kids had bumbers up on their side and seemed to enjoy it most of the time. Then we were daring again, so we out to eat. We went to a Chinese Buffet. I definitely didn't feel good afterward....lesson learned, no Chinese Buffet in Tn. Sun we went to Church and then headed home.
We enjoyed the entire trip except driving. I have to say Tn. is like a whole other world. The people are way more polite. I mean genuinely nice, "thank yous", "have a nice day." To bad their accents sound funny. It was really hard to leave them. As you can imagine we love seeing family but it's always so hard to say goodbye. We wish we had family out here, it seems like the only thing really missing but every thing is in the Lord's hands. So we shedded our tears and said our goodbyes and just pray we'll see them soon.....Love you guys and thanks for everything.


So I split the pictures into 3 slide shows. My friend Danielle was nice enough to let me borrow her REALLY nice camera and take it w/ us. So I took a lot of scenery pictures and played w/ the camera a lot just to see all the things it did. So one is just scenery pictures and the other 2 are all the fun. I played w/ the camera a lot so if the picture is blurry I wanted it that way...I know it sounds weird, but I'm really getting into photography so I wanted to adventure out of the norm, there's nothing extreme I'm not that good, but I enjoyed the camera and took lots of pictures. Thanks Danielle again for trusting me w/ your camera lots of love.....enjoy everyone.