Long, long summer

It has only been very recently that we have had time to take a moment and think about the months that have gone by. So much of our last blogs were about our move to Georgia and all that was happening there. We cannot be sure why God steered us away from the church plant at LifeTree and our new home, but we can surely say He did.
When First Baptist Grand Isle issued the call for Steven to come and serve as their pastor, honestly, at first I didn't know what to say. Steven wanted to preach and to lead people into a deeper relationship with Christ. We jumped on the opportunity.

We had a busy summer with moving in, Day camp for students, summer missionaries, and trying to basically fit in. Cajun country is different from any other place on earth, to say the least. Just getting acqainted with the dialect is challenging. It wasn't long before our kiddos were saying "may-yeh" and ending their sentences with pronouns, "She doesn't like peanut butter and jelly, her." We were settling in!

The people of First Baptist Church made it an easy transition for us. Teaching us how to get the crab meat out of blue crab, telling Steven the best way to catch Redfish, and how to jig for flounder. Our son told us after the first two weeks of being here that he had to get off of all this seafood. Sadly, he's not much of a seafood fan!

Spiritually, we see a great need for awakening here. So many claim to know Christ, but don't live it at all. There is little knowledge of a living relationship with Christ. We want so badly to pass on this knowledge of a loving Savior that wants to have Daily fellowship with us!

I'm not even going to mention how Gustav and Ike disrupted everything. We are still in a state of helping others clean out from under the sand! We spent weeks after the storms serving food and opening our gym with disaster relief supplies. We have had a few hard working teams come down to help clean up as well. Much thanks goes out to the local churches for sending supplies and sending people to serve on Grand Isle.

Now we will settle in for what is promised to be a quiet reprieve from the busy summer. We will enjoy a slightly less occupied island and hopefully get revived for summer 2009!