This is the Way

This morning we started out a bit later, and that's so odd.  But we were in time for KidPak, as you can see above.  We watched our online KidPak service, although we watched our main Free Chapel service first.  Both services were great, of course.  With our KidPak service, Madison was actually there on screen again, although in the background.  Somewhat like Daddy.  We were there helping set up the game segment, which the girls won this week.  That's what we were filming on Tuesday.  It came out really well, thanks to Josh's editing.

We've had a pretty good response to our videos online right now.  One particular video has been shared 767 times with nearly 100 comments on it so far.  It's an odd side effect of the quarantine, a situation where people are looking for children's ministry online, and discovering us for the first time.  Here we go:  into a new world online.

This afternoon, Madison did spend some more time on piano.  Daddy tried out the new shower head in the bathroom, and we both did our rancor monster workout this afternoon.  We were back on the Kinect game, this time on a large spacecraft, fighting our way through battle droids in order to free some fellow padawan prisoners.  It was again quite a workout, and again, we didn't finish the entire game in one sitting.  We're crash-landing on the planet Felucia, and we'll just have to pick up from there what happens next with tomorrow's workout!

The rancor monster game has a co-op mode, and we didn't realize this until recently, so the two of us made quick work of Mos Eisley Spaceport, knocking down tie fighters and ravaging AT-STs.  Speaking of which, Daddy made this Star Wars graphic this afternoon as a joke, but Mommy liked it enough to share it elsewhere, so we did:

We were reading this scripture again, and there's the Mandalorian phrase there:  "This is the way."  We saw that in the Bible, and of course it made me think of our hero Din Djarin somewhat.  Obviously, it's God's voice that's telling us, "This is the way."  But we are like that Mandalorian warrior, marching forward with the full armor of God, sticking to the code that God has set forth for us.  Yeah, that all seems to have the makings of a future message, doesn't it?

Anyway, we had a conversation with Nana and Ba-Ba this afternoon, and that's because Mommy made a wonderful discovery today.  Someone on the ancestry website showed her a few pictures of Madison's great-grandfather during World War I.  That's Nana's father.  These pictures were recently auctioned off somewhere, and someone else bought them, which is a shame because that's Nana's father, and it seems like they should go to her.  But at least we got these digital versions, which I'll share here:

These two are of Reginald Ulett, Nana's father - and Maddie's great-grandfather  And this one below is her uncle Clarence, who also served Great Britain during World War I.

We did do some piano today, or at least Madison did.  As she always says, "Practice makes perfect."  It's a bit of a chore getting ready to dive into practice, but when she does, she's diligent to give it a proper go.  The end result is getting better and better, obviously.  Though not perfect, she's surely heading into that direction.  Her recital piece is sounding nice, and she's returning to some older songs she knew to see if she can handle those.  Some from her new book are nice as well.

Another thing she did today was write a letter.  Yes, we are bad parents.  Can you believe she has not written a letter to someone before?  So today, we found a greeting card we had in our collection, a note card meant to write this sort of letter on.  She sat down and carefully wrote out a brief message, and then here's the part where Mommy showed her how to write the addresses on the envelope, and then put the stamp on the envelope too.  Tomorrow morning's he'll put the finished product in the mailbox, and she'll have sent off her first letter!  It was to her friend Jolina, who actually wrote her a letter first.  This week's KidPak Challenge was about writing letters to others to encourage them, and so far Madison has done one.  She may do another later on, although technically she's done a few cards that weren't mailed, but rather sent off to the senior centers.

So tonight we watched "Pirates of the Caribbean" again, this part of a decision to watch more of these movie series back-to-back.  So the next four nights are set in stone for viewing, as we've put off "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" off until we've finished reading the book.  During tonight's movie, Madison turned to us and told us she forgot how good this movie was.  At the time, there had been a vast expanse of many decades since a high quality pirate movie came out.  Until this time, all we had were the old pirate movies, Muppet Treasure Island, and Cutthroat Island, a movie Madison hasn't seen yet.  No one dared to make a pirate movie, or no one really knew how to make a good one.  Cutthroat Island was okay, and Daddy's philosophy was always that if you were rating a movie on a scale of one to ten, a pirate movie always got a plus one, despite your thinking of what the quality of the movie was.  It could be an absolute zero, but it's still a 1 because it has pirates in it.  That being said, "Pirates of the Caribbean" is an 11.  It was the pirate movie we were all hoping and waiting for.  The sequels, of course, were not as good.  But they're still enjoyable, and so for the next few nights, we'll all be doing a good bit of pirating in the Caribbean.

The sailing continued after the movie, this time aboard the Dawn Treader.  Lucy has read from the magic book, and the Dufflepods are revealed.  Tomorrow night, we head into darkness, a scary part of the journey.  Which sort of makes sense, as we're visiting with Davy Jones tomorrow night as well.

One more note about today:  the wind was so intense!  It was as if an immense storm was about to pounce on us, all day long.  And yet nothing ever came, or was ever threatened.  The wind blew in a way that looked like it threatened the trees, pushing the to and fro and testing their limits.  Nothing fell, but the mighty roar of the wind outside on more than one occasion had us marveling, and perhaps feeling a little concerned.  It was like that all day, and all last night, a mighty rushing wind.

As that wind roared outside, we said our prayers tonight, and we read from a Narnia devotional that we also picked up recently at Goodwill.  That was before the virus stopped us all from going out to visit stores and so forth.  We prayed for our grandparents, and we prayed for our nation, for our leaders and for everyone struggling with sickness.  We can get through this.  It looks bleak right now, it sounds like a storm out there.  But everything is still standing, and we'll walk out of this together as we hear His voice telling us, "This is the way."