The Jewelflower

If you know anything about Steve and I you know that neither of us are nature lovers. Sure we appreciate nature and even take the rare hike but in general we really arn't "Green." Why then you might be asking are you titling this blog: "The Jewelflower?" Well that is a good question because it has very little to do with this blog...

One of the things that defines Marin County where we live is being Green. Some churches in the area (a few years ago) got together and decided that a way we could show the local community we care is to do some service in the parks around the county. So last weekend about 200 church volenters went out all around the county to do just that. Steve and I felt like it would be a good way to reachout in our community and signed up to help out at the Tiburon work site.

After a nice worship serivice that morning all the volenteers headed out to their sites. Our site director gave us a printed discription saying that our site was known as the home for the endangered Jewelflower. We decided to make a game and guess what color the Jewel flower was.

Steve guessed it was going to be blue. I thought it was going to be purple. We invite you to guess too! We'll let all you other non green people know at the end of the blog.

Once we arrived at our site we were given the task to remove the weed called Broom. Behind Steve in the picture is tons of Broom. I being my non green self thought it was pretty and would have guessed it was a flower not a weed.

We were given very heavy orange tools to help us pull out the Broom. It was hard manual labor and slow work. We hope that even though we were quite far off the beaten path that someone was affected by our work.

We decided if we do it again we will try and pick a more public place to go. We were a little sad we didn't get to meet anyone to tell them why we were doing this work but we still had a lot of fun trying something new.

So is it killing you to know what the Jewelflower is yet? Yeah it was killing us too... because we never saw it the whole time we worked. Once we realized we weren't going to find it we looked it up online. Scroll to the bottom of the blog to find out if you guessed the color right!

Ministry Moments

Since returning from the Middle East Steve and I have been in high gear. I thought I would update you on a couple of ministry moments from the last month.

One ministry highlight of ours was getting to drive three middle school girls to and from our youth Super Bowl party. We enjoyed listening to their humorous insights on life (why Coldplay rocks, what kind of awesome car they want when they can drive, how they can't stand people who constantly "like" their stuff on Facebook, and which celebrity break up was the most heart breaking...) and answering some questions about ourselves (Do you like Coldplay? Do you live together? Do you have facebook?...) One cool question that made this such a ministry highlight moment of ours was "What religion are you?" We were able to quickly share the gospel and what we stood for as Chrisitians. Isn't it awesome when evangelism is that easy!

Another Ministry highlight of the month was in our churches Wednesday night ministry. I have been praying for a while that I would be able to take the children I babysit to church with me and I finally got my chance! They came with me for the Wednesday night children's music and loved it. After talking to me and the children their parents have decided to let them come with me regularly! Praise God for his faithfulness to answer prayer! The greatness of Wednesday night didn't stop there. We had our largest group of youth attend since we joined.

I decided to write this blog because far too often it is easy to focus on the disappointments in ministry instead of the great things God is doing. God is doing great things here in Marin county and I am so thankful to be a small part of it.