15-Passenger Vans & Arkansawyers?

Hello, all!

As many of you know I am presently on my way to ville of Nash...er...rather, Nashville. With, you guessed it, a whole slew of high schoolers from our church youth group. Paps is the male chaperon and yours truly is the female chaperon. What fun! What fun!!

I've been pretty nervous about this trip for a a while, and so have solicited a number of my prayer warriors to move to the front lines for me, dad, and the kiddos, especially "my" precious girls...and a number of other sweet warriors have stepped up to the plate of their own accord - God's fam ROCKS!

I must tell you, while the road trip has been long and tiring, the kids have been great. Hardly any snibbling whatsoever - miracle?? I think yes.

We successfully made it to Arkansas...and my what a state. There is definitely not much here other than pretty trees...and oddly named places...

Gum addicts, I have found your heaven on earth!!

We are currently in Little Rock and got to cross the Arkansas River on our way to Little Rock, where we are not so alone, but you know...not everything is like they say it is in country songs...

Kinda pretty...kinda "muddy"...what river in the middle of industry isn't?

Side-note: Did you know that people from Arkansas generally call themselves Arkansawyers?? Some people are trying to make it officially Arkansans...but, personally, I like Arkansawyers.

We checked-in to our hotel only to find that the pool was closing in 30min, bummer...but, there's always tomorrow, I reckon. So, on that note we decided to make a trek find some fooooods!!! I We were all quite hungry. We ended up parking our feet at a Taco Bell/KFC - classic. As is usual when i encounter a Taco Bell...I caved and ordered myself a volcano burrito, complete with cinnamon twists!! YUM :)

After dinner we had our joint devo time and then we girls came back to our room and the boyos stayed put where they were so we could have our "safe-zone" devo time. May I just say that the girls and I had a beautiful time of transparent honesty tonight. My heart was weeping tears of joy that felt safe and comfortable diving into things with me. While we are together this week we are going to have our "safe-zone" devo time each night. During these special times we will be digging into and hashing out some difficult but beautiful issues we as young aspiring Christian women face, quite often on a day-to-day basis. I seriously cannot wait spend more time with this precious daughters of the King. As broken as we all are in own very different ways I think we will all benefit greatly from our quiet times together each night. I have a feeling God is going to move in big ways this week. {***excited!!!***}

Please, please, please continue to pray for or add all of us Higher Things bound peoples in your prayers this week, especially my sweet girls - that they would continue to feel comfortable and safe talking to me about things they have on their hearts, etc.; that their hearts and minds would be open and surrendered to the love and refinement (all so often painful) of our Heavenly Daddy. For me, that I would have open eyes and ears to what God wants me to address with these young ladies; that whatever I might say would be said out of love and would be completely pointed and intentional; that I would be bold for Christ with these girls. And...that I would keep my sanity would be a good one to add to the list, just to be safe ;)

So far so good!! Glory!

Tomorrow, circa 9am we will hit the road again, in an attempt to reach Nashville by about 3pm. Higher Things doesn't actually start until Tuesday, so we will have some free time tomorrow afternoon/evening before everything gets rolling and true exhaustion begins brewing on Tuesday! Hooray! I'm extremely excited about getting to see one of my old roommates once we get to Nashville - can't wait to see you Fai!

And with that, loves, I am outty - gotta get some shut eye before the last leg of the drive tomorrow.

Nighty-night!

Shalom!
~MW