overwhelmed with gratitude

Just have to write a quick blurb about how thankful I am for the mercy and goodness of God in putting where He has. We've been at the Christ Fellowship SLNI retreat now for a couple of days. For those of you who don't know, this is a retreat they do every three years for the church planting teams (Croatia, Hawaii, and Thailand). This year, they included us as part of the missionaries because of Como. We've gotten over feeling weird about that and are just enjoying being blessed. The truth is we were in DESPERATE (I cannot capitalize that enough) need of some "refueling." Most of these people are the ones we were in training school with several years ago and as we all worshipped together tonight I was OVERWHELMED with what God did in bringing us to CF. I treasure every one of these couples and their children. They humble me. There aren't any other people on the planet I'd rather spend a couple of hours worshipping with. Tonight we took communion in these cool communion cups that had been made by this guy from CF who is a potter. He designed these as gifts for each team and each one had a different look. I know you're thinking what's the big deal? But it was...well, I really don't have words to describe it or most things I'm feeling right now. I'm just so grateful. When you see where the sweet hand of the Father has taken you...well, I'm speechless, but full of tears! We were singing an old Hillsong song tonight "Ask for the Nations" when the Holy Spirit started doing something among our children. A couple of the kids from the Thai team were just weeping, and suddenly McKenna was wrapped around my waist crying. The kids were dismissed to go to their kid time and I looked outside a little later and saw that McKenna, Kate Pennington, and a couple of other girls were outside crying out to God for the salvation of the people in their respective countries (or in our case, neighborhood). All the other kids continued praying inside and were asking for the Lord to speak. Josiah saw a picture of lots of people from Como standing at the gates of heaven. We realized later that McKenna had had a very similar picture. I saw more joy in our two older kids afterwards than I've seen in a long time. Our family has been pretty "messed up" lately - it's just figuring out how to do life in Como together, but it's been hard. I love how God's timing is so perfect and how He is using these precious people in our lives this week. These words are so weak, but I just don't want to forget the fire hydrant drink that our parched souls received tonight. May each of you be overwhelmed with the extravagant love of Father God!

Anda