Sunday!

My Mom and my Ma have encouraged me for a while, to share the day to day Jones Crew happenings, but my heart is so full sometimes and I consider it therapeutic to share that. It's been harder to write like that since I started working again, 1 year ago. But everyday life can be every bit as inspiring! Things at church were a little nutty today! I love my job...I work with anywhere from 50 to 80 volunteers (depending on whether people show up or not!). There are so many great things I get to do within the boundaries of the ministry I serve and the crazy-incredibly creative Lady that I work for, that I can't begin to list it all here!!! But it starts off with making coffee around 7:30am on the 3 days I work each work week, and ends AND begins again with loving on all those people, the parents, and the children, every Sunday morning from 9am to 1pm or so. I LOVE IT!!! It thrills my soul to love on these people...to serve the Lord this way. Some Sundays, it IS a labor of love in the sweaty kind of way. TODAY was one of those days!!!
After arriving at church, I was greeted by some fabulous ladies in Sunday School (I teach a ladies class every Sunday morning at 8am and LOVE IT!!!). I love them. I use the word "love" a lot, I know, but it's the only way I can describe these awesome opportunities and people that God has placed into my life!!! After neatly (and shockingly) putting away a nice game of "Last Word" (it was game-day, and by "putting away", I mean I WON...NOT YOU SHANNON!!!!), I ran down to begin the routine of getting the children's helpers and rooms taken care of. We wound up with 11 crawlers, so I had to keep moving people over to that room...it was a little bit crazy! Over the course of the session, I wound up running to The Crows Nest in the sanctuary...during service...to post 3 different kiddies numbers so that their parents could pick them up. I must have lost 5 pounds and a few brain cells by the time I ran down the steps on that last call! Made up for that at Bojangles on the way home, though... So after a few crying little ones, and one poop-in-the-floor incident...and countless miles of running (my brain gets fuzzy on the actual mileage), I'm home resting, so I can begin the process again. It's crazy, I know, but all this is "me" time. Being the mom of 5 doesn't lend itself to such, so my version of "me" time is probably a lot different than yours. Doing paperwork, database entries & changes, and preparing snacks, are all very satisfying tasks to me, and that's only the beginning! Compared to biting my tongue in the face of my pre-teen who is currently experiencing a VERY good reason to be ill and hateful, LADIES, persuading sometimes crabby people to serve little ones cheerfully, is nothing short of a big slice of apple pie!!! And I LOVE apple pie!!! There we go with that word again...