Worship at Home

I woke up at 3:30 this morning with some kind of intestinal virus and so being that it's the Sabbath, Ciaran and I worshipped at home together. I missed being at church (I really am starting to love the church we've decided to settle in at), but there was something nice about "church" at home this morning...even though I felt like vomitting through most of it. ;-) We listened to an old Mark Driscoll sermon online. The focus of the sermon was on God's foreknowledge and God's sovereignty. I love how doctrinally rich Driscoll's sermons are and he opened the sermon reading John 18 -19:1-16 to focus us in on Jesus as the King. Sooo good. We then used YouTube to listen to a number of worship songs and ended our time of worship in prayer. Even though I was sick, it was still a nice morning worshipping the Lord through the Word, music and prayer. Praise God that we don't have to be in a church to worship Him, that we can gather anywhere and worship him in spirit and in truth. But even though it was a precious time with the Lord, I still can't wait for Wednesday night when we'll be back home and worshipping at E Free on Christmas Eve with all of the believers there!!!!

This afternoon Ciaran let me sleep until my fever broke and then we watched the cartoon Grinch on TV and now we're about to watch White Christmas. Ciaran needed to get some work done at school today, but he offered to stay at home with me this afternoon since I'm feeling so crummy. He's so good to me. Hopefully I'll be feeling better by tomorrow because I myself have a ton of work to get done at school yet too. I don't want to have to cart home too many papers to grade; I know I'll have at least 90 papers to grade at home, but I'm going to try and get the rest of it done here before we head north late on the 23rd or early on the 24th. Well, I think it's time to watch our movie now. Hope everyone's enjoying a restful and joy-filled Sabbath as we prepare our hearts for Christmas!!! Enjoy your day!

Hoping for a Snow Day

As the title shows you...I'm REALLY hoping for a snow day tomorrow. When I was in high school, I didn't really consider that teachers might get just as excited as us when considering the possibility of a snow day. But what I most certainly never considered was that teachers get EVEN MORE excited about the possibility of a snow day than the students. At my high school today, it was all we teachers could talk about and you should have seen us all piling out of the school today, heavy-laden with all our papers to grade over break, ever the optimists about the potential for this snow day tomorrow. The idea of a whole extra day to grade and lesson plan tomorrow just fills me with glee! To make matters worse, or rather to highlight my greediness for said snow days, I have to admit that while Ciaran trudged off to school on Monday, my friend Nicole and I were allowed to lounge because at 6:10am, we received the phone call that our district was without power and we didn't have to report to work. :-) So here I am, just about to enjoy a beautiful two week break and I only have taught three days this week and yet I'm still hoping for another day off. Pretty sad isn't it?! Let's chalk it up to first year teacher fatigue. ;-) The worst part is, my dear husband (who had to work on Monday) also has to go back and teach on Monday and Tuesday of next week, while I joyfully sit in my empty classroom getting ahead on lesson plans and unit planning for next semester. That's the only bad thing about teaching in two different districts...our calendars are different and oftentimes when one of us has a day off, the other doesn't. Well, here's hoping that both of our districts are closed tomorrow so Ciaran can get some rest before going back to work on Monday and Tuesday...and that I can get my grading caught up. :-) OK, thanks for letting me post these silly little hopes here tonight. Ciaran and I are now off to my school's choir concert; I have a ton of kids singing in this event tonight...I'm really excited! Enjoy your night!

For a Good Cause

Today at the high school I teach at, the students kicked out a bunch of their teachers and administrators and sent us to the curb in front of the high school for the day. Our mission, to beg for donations from passing cars to help us give twenty-six needy families in our community a wonderful Christmas. I was a little uncertain about this since it was my first experience with this annual event, but it ended up being SO much fun. To get me to the curb my students had to bring in money (we worked on raising the money for the past two weeks) and a dollar sent me to the curb for one minute. I stood outside, in the freezing cold and snow for just about an hour each block. I was so proud of my students for raising this money! After a day of chasing vehicles (my favorite was the massively large cement truck that my friend Nicole and I rushed--the driver ended up giving us a substantial donation), and standing in the freezing cold, I am exhausted, but have a wonderful memory to take with me from this first year of teaching. The other highlight from the day was explaining to very confused looking drivers that our students had kicked us out of the school. As soon as I would say that part of my little rehearsed spiel about our mission, the drivers would almost always laugh and hand me a bunch of money. One gentleman laughed and told me he wished he and his peers would have thought of kicking their teachers out for a day back when he was in school. And for those of you wondering who exactly was supervising our students as we stood outside all day...well never fear, we had a whole host of substitutes at the ready to take over our classes for us once we were banished from the building. We teachers also gave up our planning blocks to cover other classes. I actually only had one sub in my room today, the others were my colleagues which I think was fun for the kids too. Seeing your psychology teacher in your English classroom is always interesting, right?! In the end we raised over $6,000 dollars which was really exciting. What a fun day!

Praying for my Husband

One of the greatest privileges I've discovered in the past two and a half months of marriage is praying for my husband. I started praying daily for Ciaran last year when he was in New Hampshire, but now that we're married, my prayers for him have taken on a whole new dimension and I consider it such a privilege to support him in this way. And I wanted to share two wonderful resources that I have been using to aid my prayer efforts.

First I want to highlight Revive Our Hearts' "31 Days of Pryaing for Your Husband." I love this resource because each day has a different focus for prayer and then it has accompanying verses. The website also has a PDF download available for those of you that do not like the web format and want to print it out. I especially appreciate this because I love anything that I can easily access online.

The next resource aiding me in my prayer efforts is Stormie Omartian's The Power of a Praying Wife. I love this book so much! Each chapter has some commentary and personal reflections on the topic for prayer and then she actually has a written out prayer that you can pray word for word or use it as a starting point. Some of the topics for prayer include, his work, his finances, his mind, his purpose, his priorities, his obedience, his walk, his talk, etc. This resource is truly invaluable to me right now as it guides my prayers and keeps me focused on praying with an eternal perspective.