An Awesome Weekend

Okay, so it's Monday night, so I'll get down to details here right away before getting into the weekend. At weigh in I lost 1.7 pounds for the week. I really had no idea what to expect, the scale at home is wonky and then today I had a service call for work that went well into the day, so lunch was rather late, and by that time I was starved. Now I think i did pretty good, it was a grilled chicken salad at Carl Jr's, but with a mongo diet coke. As late as that was, and not really any time to ummm.... process it all? I didn't know how I'd do, so I was pretty pleased.

So there's one week to go, and I know I'm in the running. In fact I'm finding myself pretty ready to go all out this next week. Nothing stupid I don't think, just good sensible eating and good sensible exercise. Maybe the one thing I think I'll do differently though is, I'm kicking diet soda at least for the week. I'm hooked on the stuff, big time, but I think for the next week I'm going to make a big effort to go heavy on the water drinking, which I know I should do anyway, and cut out the other stuff. Okay, maybe a coffee in the morning or a glass of milk, but none of the other stuff.

I'm kinda guessing my weight to be 363 right now, which would be right at 30. My hope is that by next Monday night I can use my wife's scale, which goes to 350. Not that I expect to lose 13 by then, but I'm thinking it will actually go up to 355, and if i can get that to register, I'd be just thrilled with that.

Okay, so... the weekend. It got off to an pretty incredible start. Friday night our church was having a men's retreat down by Colorado Springs, it was a pretty nice little retreat center. Beautiful country! And there was a lot of hurrying to get out the door, but as I got home before taking right off again, there was a letter from my son Josh, the one in Basic Training.

Fortunately someone else was driving, so that gave me the chance to read... which I'm really glad because it would have been hard to drive. He started out saying he knew I had ears and eyes and could tell there were areas he'd fallen away in his faith, but... to make a long letter short, he rediscovered his faith. He talked about what it meant when I said I was proud of him, and he wants to make me proud even more.

The thing is... there's nothing else he has to do to do that. Just him being the man he is makes me proud. I hope and pray I do a good job communicating that. He needs to know.

Then the retreat was pretty good as well. It was just good to get away a bit, connect with other men from the church, and we had some pretty good messages. Jim Weidman, formerly known as the Family Night guy with Focus On The Family, spoke. I thought it was pretty cool to get a guy who was already somewhat known to speak to a small group of 40 guys. I thought he was really good, and really stirred up a lot of thoughts about how to grow as a man, a husband, and a father.... The fellowship was great, and it's amazing how good a group of 40 guys can sound singing praises together. Okay, we were also blessed by having a great worship leader...

I'm quite happy right now with the church family I'm a part of. I never thought I'd say that about a church that wasn't from my 'non' denomination. But there's a good group of believers, some great leadership, and just this body of people that have created a good church home.

God does great things...