Days of December - Hope, Peace, Joy and Love- Day 14

This is a day of hope... of peace. I have been surrounded with wonderful friends debating Christian thoughts without attack. Riete had a good blog on different religions, which turned in to a discussion of how these religions could have some practices that would benefit a good Christian (who is open-minded enough to realize that!) Steve has had some wonderful advent blogs (and so has Riete); Sea and Karen have been doing Days of December blogs, and I had a good chat with Patrick this afternoon about false prophets in today's time.

I would say that at least half of my friends here are not Christian, but are wonderfully supportive of my beliefs. I had a warm pm from one just saying "I love, love, love your attitude!" I am so grateful that you are all a part of my life!

Today was laid back at work- which is really scary, since we're T-7 work days left until Christmas and usually this is a wildly hectic time. But I was able to finish a project that will make a few other projects easier to do. It took me all day, but I needed a calm day to get it done. I had to input all our "time and talent" forms into the church database. This is a list of all the things people want to volunteer for in the next year. Since I also need to do nursery worker, usher, and other schedules, having this input will save a lot of time. There were 225 forms to input, but now sorting data will be so much easier than flipping through all those forms every time I need to know something! So there's my joy for the day!

I had fun reading some of them. I have worked here 11 years and know the people pretty well, so I laughed out loud at some of the things people volunteered for. Not in a bad way, but I'll give you an example. The teenagers volunteer for EVERYTHING! They really want to be involved in things. The people who are dedicated to one ministry area volunteer for everything in that area. There's a group of older people who volunteer for one or two things. Then there are the ones who don't want to be caught not filling out a form (like we send the form police out?) so they turn one in but don't check anything!

I'm home, lying on the sofa and looking at my tree and my winter village which are all decorated! The mantle lights are on, and there's a fire in the fireplace. I don't think it got above freezing today. This is the south! It doesn't get this cold! (I know, someone is going to tell me how to blame this on global warming- right?) The wind chill was 5 this morning- temps of 15! They're actually calling for snow Wednesday night. All I can say is either snow or get warmer, darnit!