Liberty and Gus

This morning was a different sort of service, our annual Miracle Prayer Service, the one that concluded the church fast that we've been on this month.  This year, because of Uncle Dave's death and memorial service, we broke the fast last week.  It was just a tough time for the family, but we're determined to make up for it throughout the year.  Madison kept her fast going until the memorial service, when the family joined together and had food provided for us by the church.

Still, all along, Madison has been filling out her DEVOTED devotional, a devotional booklet that accompanies the fast, and gets kids filling out scripture-related questions, while looking up references and stories from the Bible.

This morning's service was shorter for the kids, as they had to be in the classroom earlier - but Daddy has some activities for all the classrooms so that there was something to do there beyond simply waiting for moms and dads.  Madison was there a good bit this morning when you add up the two services.

But she also spent a good amount of time in the service as well.

This picture touches our hearts.  It was taken by Pastor Lance, and has touched many other hearts as well - our daughter is so beautiful and has a heart after the Lord.  We don't take credit for it, although we've done the best we could.  But as any parent will say, there is a whole lot of grace in effect.  In that respect, we are enormously blessed with favor.  Our child has such wisdom and such a good heart for others, and faithful and responsible, and highly rewarding.  Not to mention just plain fun to be with!

This afternoon, we stayed indoors, what little time we had left after the two services.  There was a bit of piano to finish up, and after that a scavenger hunt for power discs.  We have a lot of the 2.0 discs, and these are all great rewards for doing piano, or doing other random chores.  One of today's discs was Gus, a donkey with a football helmet on.  This is from the movie "Gus," which is about as obscure as you can get when it comes to a modern video game experience.  We own the movie, and with all the football going on today (AFC and NFC Championship Games), Daddy was thinking of watching that one.  But Madison wanted to watch "Attack of the Clones," and so there it was.  We had the popcorn again, and were set to do our research, watching something take place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

It is a long movie, actually.  We got to bed a tiny bit later, and we had some time to read from our latest time-traveling book.  We've got two-and-a-half chapters to go on that one, so we're approaching the end.  The characters meet a girl named Maddie, which of course was funny to Madison.  They ran into her at the Supreme Court, which is something we were learning about tonight as we read.  Madison knows there are nine justices now, and knows it is part of the judicial branch.  See?  All kinds of learning going on, and it's a fun read for her too - she likes Liberty the horse, who she has with her each night when we read.

It was a fun day, with a great service in the morning, a bit of rest in the afternoon, and a few equine sorts of characters to highlight the end part:  Liberty and Gus.