Welcome to MoMo’s! HERE are the guidelines. If this is your first time giving your “amazing story”, PLEASE take time to read them. It will save us both a lot of time.

To join me, write a post today (or a post you’ve written from last Monday to Sunday) sharing something tht has happened to you this last week - anything funny or interesting, crazy, fulfilled, too busy, hilarious, wistful, or any number of out of the ordinary happenings that made you happy or miserable last week.  Put a link in your post to this post permalink (not my general URL) and then put the permalink of your post (not your general URL) here at the end of this post. Thanks.  By the way, I do this because I love stories.  To tell them, to hear them, and to read them.

So tell me your “Inspired by the truth” story every Monday…

Here’s mine.

This last week has been really rough for me.  It started last Monday afternon when I arrived home from a trip to New York.  I noticed that my back was really hurting me.  Now this is not something revolutionarily new in my life.  Occasionally when I lift weights wrong or put too much strain on my back when I exercise, this happens to me for a while, but the strange thing about this was that I hadn’t really done anything for like 4 days that would put strain on my back.  It just started hurting.

And for 2.5 days of my week it hurt.  I had been a to a chiropractor last year, and he had given me some exercises to go through when it started hurting, so I did those, and felt only a bit better after a day or recurring back exercises.

Then on Wednesday I actually justified this to myself:  “So, If my back is hurting this bad, and that is without exercise, than I might as well exercise.”  So I went out and played basketball on Wednesday night, which not only hurt my back worse, but it also brought in flu like symptons on Thursday.

If Tuesday had been bad, Thursday was just miserable.  I was dizzy, unresponsive to conversation, my stomach hurt, my back hurt, and in the evening, I started sneezing, and my back hurt every time I did.  I even missed small group and wrote this post that evening.

I should stop now and say that through all this, my wife was on vacation and did an amazing job of taking care of me.  So thanks to Carie for her amazing patience!

On Friday – Sunday, I felt a bit better, which ushered in a new problem of a stuffy nose, which is how I finished my week of sickness.

I don’t share this with you to complain.  I share this with you so that you will help me come up with a list of things to do when one is sick.  For those of you who can sleep all the time, you’re all set – you can sleep all the time.  However, I pretty much sleep for about 6 hours a night, and about 30 minutes in the afternoon, and the rest of the day, I need to find things to do when I’m sick.  Finding things to do when I’m not sick is easy.  I’m not lazy.  But things to do when I’m sick…I need help!

Here are some things I did while I was sick and in bed this week:
Blogged
Read
Played snood, the ultimate  video game
watched season 1 of Prison Break with my wife

Come on, you can make this list better, can’t you?

 Welcome to MoMo’s! HERE are the guidelines. If this is your first time giving your “amazing story”, PLEASE take time to read them. It will save us both a lot of time.

To join me, write a post today (or a post you’ve written from last Monday to Sunday) sharing something tht has happened to you this last week - anything funny or interesting, crazy, fulfilled, too busy, hilarious, wistful, or any number of out of the ordinary happenings that made you happy or miserable last week.  Put a link in your post to this post permalink (not my general URL) and then put the permalink of your post (not your general URL) here at the end of this post. Thanks.  By the way, I do this because I love stories.  To tell them, to hear them, and to read them.

So tell me your “Inspired by the truth” story every Monday…

Here’s mine.

This was a weekend of community.  I love community.  I’m growing to appreciate it more and more. 
Here’s the way my weekend panned out, and you can tell me whether Carie and I were communified.

Fridays are date nights, and this weekend wasn’t going to be any different.  Carie had planned on making a wonderful dinner and we were going to hang out and relax.  This was a beautiful plan,and it almost worked out.  Then Al called.  His wife had to go to the emergency room.  Their two kids needed to be taken care of, and I was the perfect candidate.  So I went to their apartment and enjoyed the beautiful sounds of their two  year old Wyatt screaming his head off because he wanted “daddy and mommy to stay with him.” 

“Frankly Wyatt, I couldn’t agree more, but we’re going to have to work this thing out, all right?”

We didn’t work it out for at least another 20 minutes when I got brilliant and put the Disney movie “Cars” in the DVD player and he was hooked for another 5 minutes until he fell asleep for 2.5 hours.  That amount of time can be translated to the amount of time that someone else had come in to take my place and watch the kids at that point.  Sweet!  I didn’t even have to change the baby.  Carie brought over pizza (she had been with Al & Erica) and we had dinner with the new babysitters for the evening, then we shared with them the news that it was date night, and we would now be leaving.

Saturday morning I woke up.  Jay and Erin were moving from Spencer to Worcester, and I was helping them move.  Carie had a BIble study to attend.  So I took the next several hours (from 9:20 am – 12:30 pm to help them move their stuff out of storage into their moving truck and then on to their new home.  It was a great time, and not ridiculously hard.  In fact, what made the time even more amazing was that the weather people around the Massachusetts area hotted and hollored about the tremendous amounts of rain that would be gathering in central Mass the entire Saturday.  You could imagine our surprise when the sun came out for several hours, along with very nice temperatures.

I drove home and Carie was enjoying the beautiful New England day on our porch, allowing the sun to beat down on her beautiful skin.  I hung out with her.  Then Darren came.  Then Michelle came.  Then Jessica (Carie’s sister who lives with us) woke up (yes, it was about 1:30pm).  Then Al and Chris joined us. Then Tom and Tina came.  We all hung out.  We laughed.  Some of them (Darren, Al, and Chris) made videos.  We played “Loaded Questions.”  We ate dinner together.  We played boggle.  Basically, several of us just hung out and enjoyed one another’s community.

This morning we went to church and I had something to do with that too.  The community was great and I am so thrilled about the people coming into the life of Fellowship Church.  Amazing!

Then this afternoon Carie made an impromptu call to Erica about the people in their household coming over to have dinner with us.  So this would include Marty, Carie, Jessica, Al, Erica, Wyatt, Liam, Chris, and Joann.  I thought I’d call up Darren, Pam, and Brandon for good luck and we had another fit of community over Burrito pie and chips. We all had a great time getting to know each other more and chilling over games, food, and conversation.

It really was a whole weekend of community.  I love meeting with friends, both new and old, and I’m looking forward to growing with more people who like to build community as time goes on.  I just don’t understand the mindset of people who want to make it in this world on their own.  I look at my family and friends, and thank God everyday for who I’m becoming because of their influence.

What about you?  Do you have time for your community?