St. Patrick's Day Celebration, 2020

The virus may have cancelled our meeting together under one roof, but it did not cancel church at all. There was a great service to watch online, and we were all in it together, worshipping from our different houses, all at the same time viewing our service online.  We chose the eleven o'clock service because we knew that we had a special guest also with us, watching:

That's right, the President of the United States was also watching our Free Chapel service.  Pretty nifty, huh?  The message was a message of hope, and a message of faith over fear.  Much ado about nothing, when you consider God is in control.  He is with us, He is for us.

It was great.  This morning, we also said goodbye to the grandparents and Uncle George, who would make the long trip down to Florida, back to Daytona.  They made it safely and without incident.  I suspect the cancellations of many events and locations led to a more reasonable traffic situation.  Consider that today is the last day the Magic Kingdom is open for a while.  It never is closed unless there's a severe hurricane or something like that.  Now there's talk of some of these places being closed for weeks.  Wow.

One thing we did not cancel was our annual St. Patrick's Day gathering over at Nana and Ye-Ye's house.

As always, they went all out, decorating the place with Irish flags and Celtic items, and playing Irish music for us on the television.  Ye-Ye even made this amazing version of checkers with cabbage and potatoes!

Madison loved this.  We played it literally three different times over the course of the afternoon.  And there was St. Patrick's Day Bingo too!

Nana and Ye-Ye worked very hard on making these game pieces, so we stopped for a while to play this together as well.

But there was also dinner, of course.  We had our corn beef and cabbage and potatoes, along with some Irish soda bread and Mommy's famous brownie "potatoes."  Speaking of Mommy, take a look at her here - isn't she gorgeous?

It was a nice afternoon, one where everyone dressed up and just simply caught up on things that are going on.  With the recent news in this world, there's a lot to talk about.  It was a very nice time together, one lasting a few hours until around six or seven, I can't remember.  We just kept talking.  And resting a bit too.

But we did go home eventually, and when there, both Mommy and Madison took turns taking a bath. And afterwards there was reading to do from "Thrawn," and also a new devotional, one called "Taming a Liger," a collection of twenty-eight devotional entries inspired by Napoleon Dynamite.  We got this some time ago, and it was fun reading back then.  Having just seen the movie again, it's great to read this one once more.

It was a good day.  We're taking things day by day, of course.  But yes, we've got to choose faith over fear.  It's okay to be a little afraid for what the future may hold.  But God is with us, and God is for us.    And that's the good news right there.