Life on Snow Hill

We’ve all seen them, or at least heard about them. Some scammer sends out spam emails to every imaginable address saying he has inherited millions of dollars, but it is only accessible if it goes through a bank in the US. For your willingness to help, you’ll be given a large percentage of said inheritance. All they need is your bank account number and personal information to complete the transaction.

I always promised myself that if I was ever presented with the opportunity to have some fun with one of these scammers I would. Replying to one of those emails, though, would raise red flags with them and they’d just move on.

But yesterday, I had my chance. I’m publicly listed on Skype, and I get spam messages once in a while. Yesterday was one of those times I got a scammer sending me spam on Skype’s instant messaging service. I was promised a large sum of money if I would provide the means to transfer the inheritance.

I replied to the message asking the sender if he would call me to discuss the details and provided the phone number. He asked me if it was my mobile number, to which I replied it was a land line. He asked again would I help, and my reply was to just give me a call.

Of course, the number I provided was to the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. Maybe next time I’ll be brave enough to have them call me directly and I can get some information to send to the FBI myself…who knows. That was enough fun for my day though.

For a youth revival we just concluded last night, we had a contest among the youth to see who could bring the most visitors. The reward? Yes, you guessed it – the winner gets to throw a pie in my face. Bro. Jonathan Davis got in on it too.

I just ran across this video of a Democratic county supervisor in Milwaukee wanting to boycott Arizona for their measures against illegal aliens crossing the US border into their state. I have to say, the guy that interrupted her handled things quite well. I’d have brought out a map and sat it in front of her to quiet her.

Check it out here.

My nephew, Braden, had his birthday party at Mom & Dad’s this evening. It was a fun family get-together. My dad somehow wound up on one of those razor scooters racing against Daniel…

We bought Braden an RC boat, and he was dying to take it out to the pond to try it out. He was pretty excited.

It’s always fun to get to spend some time together with family. It made for a relaxing evening, even though the bugs were out like crazy. Oh, and it was hot and humid.

This week we’ve been having Vacation Bible School at Fellowship Baptist Church. VBS is always a fun time – I always loved it growing up. It always seemed to be the most fun way to learn about the Word of God.

Now that I’m grown (mostly!) I enjoy it as a teacher. Let me back up just a bit. I teach the teens in Sunday School at church. I always try to make it as fun as I can, but there’s just a different atmosphere at VBS. We enjoy other activities like crafts and games during VBS, but even during lesson times it seems more fun. As a teacher, it’s great to see the interest the students show in learning about God.

Probably my favorite thing about it all is that there is a big crowd of young people excited about what they’re doing, and it’s all centered around the church. There’s no better place to be!

I thought I’d post a few of my favorite scenery photos from the Colorado trip. Click each one, or click one and click through the larger versions.

Let me know what you think!

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We began Saturday by getting up about 5am local time. Although our bodies have mostly adjusted to the time zone here, it wasn’t that hard to roll out of bed. It still seemed like it was no earlier than 6am, which we’re up by during a regular week at home anyway. We got our showers and began packing up the rest of our things that we had to use to get ready to go. We were mostly ready by a little after 6.

We had planned to start loading up the van at 7am, so we had some time to relax a little while before scrambling to get everything loaded and ready to go. About 6:30, we got tired of that. We went ahead and started loading up, and we were all able to leave by about 7.

We headed down the mountain and stopped at McDonald’s for breakfast. I was disappointed to find that they didn’t have biscuits and gravy, but we all had a good breakfast to last us for a while.

After breakfast, we headed to the Lewis’ house so that Bro. Lewis could drive us to the airport, and to say all our goodbye’s to the rest of the family.

Once at the airport, we found long lines at the checkin counters and at the security checkpoint. Security seemed a little tighter than normal – the terrorist threat level was orange… I can’t remember what it was when we left the Nashville airport headed to Denver. Either way, we made it through without incident and headed to our gate.

The airport was packed. We could hardly find a place to sit to wait for our plane to board. We finally did, however, and we patiently waited.

The flight was great, and Nashville never looked so good. Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time in Colorado and were so happy to be able to help the Lewis’, but I think we were all ready to be home. We landed in Nashville at a little after 2pm Central Time, waited impatiently for our luggage and headed for the van.

We were pleased to find that the van started (We’ve had a little trouble with that lately). We loaded up and hit the road.

Cracker Barrel looked good to everybody, so we stopped there for lunch/supper to hold us over for the rest of the trip home. We arrived home about 8, and it never felt so good!

Again, I want to stress how much we loved Colorado. The Rocky Mountains in their majesty make our Smokey Mountains look shrimpy. The dry air climate is something I could get used to. And last, but definitely not least, we were so glad to be able to be a help to the Lewis family and Aurora Independent Baptist Church. We stuffed bags with the book of Romans and an information card about the church, and worked on handing them out on Friday. Some of the material had been ordered, but didn’t arrive until Friday, so unfortunately we weren’t able to focus on that until Friday. The hard, tedious part has been finished, however – I think the approximate number of bags ready to go is in the neighborhood of 5,000. Now they just need to be passed out around the neighborhoods!

Please help us pray that God will grow the church and touch lives in that area. Aurora alone (a small section of the entire Denver area) has over 300,000 people. In a later post (which I’ll post soon!), you’ll see how the houses are stacked on top of each other it seems. There is a tremendous opportunity there. There are very few good churches in the area, with a huge harvest ready to be reached.

On either Wednesday or Thursday (The days begin to run together), we were able to spend some time stuffing a couple thousand bags with the book of Romans, with the Romans Road marked through it. The rest of the time on both days was spent either shopping, resting or eating.

On Friday, we spent some of the morning gathering up our luggage so we didn’t have to try to cram everything together at the last minute on Saturday. We spent the morning at the camp doing that, and resting before what the afternoon would hold.

Friday afternoon, we went to the Lewis’ house and began stuffing the same 2,000 bags with cards we had been waiting for delivery on. Once we got a few hundred of them ready, some of us men went and started hanging them on doors in local neighborhoods. When we came back for supper, we found that most all of the Romans books had been put in bags along with the cards by the ladies. We wound up with about 5,000 bags ready to go overall.

After supper, several of us went back out and put the bags on more doors. Of the few people we were able to talk to, they all seemed receptive of the literature and the idea of going to church. Our prayer is that God will have His hand in all the labor, and the information in the packets we made ready, and move on the hearts of the people we came in contact with. We are praying that Aurora Independent Baptist Church will grow and flourish for the glory of God.

First of all, I’ll say I’m sorry for the delay in getting these updates out.

On Monday, the only mission work we were able to do was remove some packets of information from doors in a neighborhood the church had some unfortunate complaints from. The good news is that out of the fairly large neighborhood, we only found about 8 packets left on the doors there, which means many, many more than that number reached their intended audience.

To be able to do more work, we are waiting for a delivery from the printer with the information to put in bags that we’ll hang on doors in more neighborhoods. We are eager to work, but unfortunately the timing is slowing us down for now.

For the remainder of Monday, we were able to go into the Rocky Mountains and see some of God’s beautiful creation. If you’ve been following my twitter and facebook updates, you’ve seen a few photos from that trip. I’ll have more to post here on the blog when we return home. We also spent a little time going through a few shops in Estes Park.

For Tuesday, we spent the day getting some much needed rest. Our bodies haven’t yet gotten used to the time change, so we’re struggling with all that comes with that.

We walked around and explored around the camp, played some ping pong and basketball, and took naps. Maybe we’ll be in better shape for the remainder of the week. What I dread, though, is getting adjusted to the time change when we get back home!

This morning we woke up and began getting ready for church. We had the privilege of attending Aurora Independent Baptist Church’s second Sunday morning service. There were a couple of families there who visited for the second time, and said they would be coming back next week.

After church, we went to the Lewis family’s house for lunch, then went back to the camp to rest.

We attended church services at First Baptist Church in Englewood tonight. We received a warm welcome and enjoyed the services.

We’re headed to Dairy Queen now for some supper, then we’ll be headed back to the camp for the night.