Making Good Use of ALL Opportunities:)

Hello friends.. It has been a while. I just haven't gotten the chance to share with you something new. Now is my time to update you though:-)

Here we are out in service with our friends from Apalachicola. (**Hint Hint** Apalachicola is a little historic town that we meet some friends in when we were checking out the congregation.) We stopped for lunch in Shell Point under the gazebo. We met a nice lady there but she only spoke french- so we couldn't really comunicate with her. Thank goodness... Kendall (service buddy) got out her Good News for all Nations book and let her read the message in french! She smiled and said what we think  was thank you.. Any ways just a little experience I thought you guys might enjoy:)

... A Day in Service in Florida

This Tuesday we went out in service as a family. We started driving down this road to get the houses- only there we no houses. We thought the ocean might be at the end of the street, so we keep on driving. Lets just say the road was not the smoothest! 

Since we have had a lot of rain the past couple of weeks, we had to keep checking to see if the puddles would be to deep to drive through. (That's dad outside)

 Riley was driving us out in service... And the journey continued... Finally the road got to rough to drive. We saw on the GPS that we were 1/3 of a mile so we decided to walk the rest of the way. (I know a lot of effort to see the ocean.. But hey- this is still all new to us!)

And we walked.. 

The Ocean!

 

So wish we had this palm in the front of our house!

(Effects Added :) )

 This is a Live Oak tree we saw... SO PRETTY!

  (...again- effects added!)

...... And that is what our service day is like!:) :)
(the next road had all the houses on it!)

Planting Seeds of Truth

Hello Everybody. I wanted to update you on a couple of our calls. Some of them have even progressed into bible studies, which have been so AWESOME! Remember the call that the young brother offered the bible study to? He gave that study to us since he was going to be starting school. Since then we have been able to conduct three studies with the family. They have four kids, I got to read some of the bible story lessons with them, and the oldest one loved it! They have enjoyed their personal study out of the Bible Teach book so much. We have had a study with them almost every week. This past week the oldest kid had to go to the hospital because his jaw swelled up. We went and visited him and the first thing he said was "I watched the video you gave me!" We had given him a video for him and his brothers and sisters to watch about obedience. His mom said that they loved the video. We brought his mom some lunch and a few magazines. She said "Great, I am so glad you brought me some things to read!" They were very thankful for us coming by. The little boy got sent home yesterday. We are hoping we can get to visit with them more this week.

On another great note, Riley got a bible study (Yay!) George handed her a call on a woman that he had been calling on for a while. The next time Riley went up and offered her a study from the Bible Teach book. She agreed. Since then they have had multiple great studies. She asked great questions like: "Where are the dead?" " Do you guys celebrate Christmas?". They studied with her 2 times a week!!! Then she said "Do you think we could not study as often? Like maybe once a week?" So now they have gotten to study once a week with her. She said that she was already in chapter seven in the book! She even uses Jehovah's name! They invited her to meeting although she didn't get to come to the meeting that week.. She said that she would try to come to the Kingdom Hall next week! Isn't that awesome? She is doing great and we look forward to more studies with her.

So there are a couple of our new experiences. We will keep you updated on how the studies continue to progress!

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach; one can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We went to the ocean today! Alligator Point (the beach closest to us) was BEAUTIFUL! The water was so clear! It was amazing. All the shells had gotten pushed up to the shore and we found some really pretty shells. But the most amazing thing we found was what was in the water....

Are you wondering what these are?..  They are sand dollars! Believe it or not.. these sand dollars are alive! We all walked out into the ocean pretty far out there. I picked up some sand, and I thought I felt something like a shell in my hand. It was a sand dollar! Ends up we were standing on a bed of sand dollars. We picked up a total of 33 sand dollars (that was just grabbing a few considering how many we really saw) It was the most amazing experience! We set all the shells out on the wet sand and  came  back to them later and they had partially buried themselves, trying to get back to the water. 

This picture is a little blurry! This is the back side of the sand dollar. Those are its little legs! So amazing:)

 

No.. we didn't keep all of them:( we just picked out a few that we liked, then let the others go back to the ocean! I have never seen anything like that before. It was so awesome! 

Tell us what you think!