Gingerbread 2021

Here it is, this year's installment of the Christmas gingerbread house!  Mom set everything up, and Maddie and I were working on it while watching "A Christmas Story" in the background.  Close up, it's not my favorite of houses, but back away further and it looks just fine.  If the house shape looks familiar, that's because back in May or so when we were doing our gingerbread house skit on stage, I found a deal on these things at a local store that still had a lot of them.  I bought a bunch of gingerbread houses to use, but I held on to three for our own personal use.  Here was October's gingerbread house - again the same shape.  The next one I'm hoping we can do is a gingerbread house for Valentine's Day.  I've always wanted to do one for Valentine's Day, so that might be fun.

We saw the final episode of "Hawkeye" tonight, which was great.  This is a series we'll probably binge watch again very soon, as it was just so good.  Hawkeye has been one of our favorite characters, and it was just so great to see a series dedicated to just him, although we had appearances of other characters throughout, and a great introduction to Kate Bishop's character as well.  This was our favorite Marvel show since WandaVision back at the beginning of the year, and we're hoping they do another season.

It was a work day, building up for the year 2022, but looking back on the successes of 2021.  Recently, we had for two days straight visitors to KidPak, both families strictly viewers of our online services, one family all the way from Zambia.  It was a great encouragement to see some of the effects of our efforts online, which we kept going the entire year, week after week with exclusive material, extra material largely not shown in services.  Back this summer, we were tasked with coming up with a Summer Xtreme with very little time to prepare for it, and yet it worked out in a huge way, and at multiple campuses too.  The year started out with the bar very low, with seats in the audience spaced out and masks on and lower expectations for crowds and quality.  And yet we did "Elevate" at the beginning of the year, with new skits and an amazing new animated video series.  We returned to Star Wars again after that, again doing an entirely new series of skits, and some awesome online videos too.  Easter was massive, our first return to church on Easter Sunday since 2019, as 2020's Easter service was entirely online.  We returned to our Storm Chasers series after that, and again wrote entirely new skits for that, and Josh did an animated Storm Chasers series that was just incredible, week after week.  And we weren't done pushing forward, doing new things:  right after that, we did an entirely new series that I had written during the pandemic, one I just did for fun, but we wound up spending about five weeks on:  a visit to the characters of Oz.  And finally, finally, we got to our Jurassic Park series, one that we've postponed a few times due to the pandemic and fire marshals and all kinds of issues in the past.  Finally we did it, and this time we actually had a dinosaur on stage with us too!  A completely new series, new messages and new skits, graphics and videos - with skits written by Camille now.  We had a great service on October 31st, with costumes and maybe one of the best videos we've done all year online with Putnam and pies.  And we weren't done pushing forward yet, once again doing all new skits with a return to Neverland.  We got caught up in a last-minute push to do an incredible - and spectacular - Christmas production for the main sanctuary, which actually cancelled our set and plans for doing a Christmas Carol story there.  But we still closed out December strong with Christmas in Neverland, a story with a lot of heart and Christmas magic.  Looking back, we clearly didn't sit back and coast through this year after the pandemic.  We were pushing forward, even with the limitations and restrictions at the onset.  And creatively, we came up with some amazing material.  It was one of our best years ever, in fact.  And the end results are not visible of course, at least not for us yet.  We've seen so many kids this year, and in each service we present the gospel, and the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Lives were changed, and families excited to return to church again.  Yes, that's it.  We were an instrument used to motivate and excite families to return to church.  And the illustration keeps popping up in my mind about the Braves' recent World Series victory - it wasn't just one player that made it all happen.  Every player in our church was an all-star, making incredible sacrifice plays and "hitting it out of the park," so to speak.  It was a good year for KidPak, and all this despite the obvious challenges.  Many of us there had the recent virus, and in fact as I type this, two of our staff workers are at home, dealing with that.  I had a miserable month with it myself, this following the heart issues that God miraculously brought me through.  One could point out all the misery and challenges, which there were plenty.  But for KidPak, this really was a remarkable year.  And this staff we have is a fantastic team, and I know that with God's help, we'll pull off something even greater in the year to come.

So today was a day off for Maddie.  She was helping put together some Christmas gifts - there are just three more sleeps 'til Christmas.  It was a quiet but slightly frantic day with all the last-minute plans and preparations.  

We read tonight before bed, closing in on that last page of this 608 page book.  Not quite there yet, as I was pretty zonked.  We said our prayers, and not long after that, we were off to sleep.