Back from vacation

Well, I got to finally enjoy a few days away from crazy hoodlums, I mean kind, loving, and wonderful youth groupers. Actually, the Baker family did enjoy a few days in Iowa seeing family and enjoying the Kings Pointe Water Park Resort in Storm Lake. It was a nice break from the craziness of the fall ministry season. You all will get a laugh at this though. Our hotel room was placed right in the middle of guess what? A high school youth group retreat from a Reformed Church (one about 5 miles from Pastor Steve's last church)! I can just never escape it can I?!? We seriously were surrounded by amped up high schoolers (although I do have to say they were calmer then ours and no one was randomly singing to people on the elevators as far as I know), which I can say I and everyone in my family is totally used to, but it would be nice to escape it at least once. Oh well, God has a fun sense of humor.

I did get to return for a good night of high school youth group. While the game was a flop (the same movie trivia program that worked great last year seemed to this time generate all movies from the early 80's and earlier), we had three great speakers join us to talk about disabilities. Phil shared about losing his leg, and having a "rod" put in the other one, while Steve and Wendy shared about the experiences of their son. We were reminded that regardless of ability we are all children of God, created in God's very image. Major thanks to them for giving their time to speak with us.

We are starting to get really pumped up about our Silver Birch Retreat January 9th-11th. Yesterday was the deadline, but something really cool as happened. We have already filled a bus way beyond capacity, so we have to get a second one. Therefore lets go ahead and see if we can fill that one too. We'll take registrations for another week then. It's awesome to see the mountain of forms in my office and the amount of excitement over this trip.


Oh and half way through this post we lost power due to the great Hingham Power Outage. About 8 solid hours without powers because our power company has all the power for our town routed through one pole the placed just off a busy highway that I think has a magnet in it attracting cars. That thing seems to get knocked down every few months. SO ANNOYING!