A Bouquet of Books....

It is hard to believe summer is coming to a close soon, and then there is that part of me that it not surprised at all when I think through all that has been accomplished and enjoyed this year. Being a wife of a youth pastor means that when summer hits, half of it is spent apart from my husband since that is the time all the trips with youth occurs. It feels like the other half of it is spent either preparing for the next trip or unpacking from the last trip. The beginning of the summer held 2 trips for us as a family, one to camp for the week with campers from church and the other to visit family in MN. Once those 2 are over, I can kind of breathe a sigh of relief knowing I can at least run the craziness from home base instead of being on the rode myself as well. I must say, that I am still just learning how to manage family, ministry, and working full-time. But in all of the hustle and bustle of it, we have soaked in moments, made memories, hidden away for times of solitude with one another, and enjoyed the fullness of life.

Well, I just got home from a back breaking grocery store run in preparation for Matt's big mission trip that he leaves on tomorrow. Me, wanting not to have to run to the store often like I normally do when he is home made a end of the world stock-up list. I am reminded of why I opt to only shop for a few days at a time-the bill can make me break down and weep right there, you must have a license to drive a shopping cart that heavy, and you must also have a husband on hand to run a mile to the other side of the store(multiple times) when you have missed another item that you in no way are going to forget and have to come back to the store again for, for at least the next year(alright-3 days). He will be gone for 9 days to work with the inner city kids of Detroit, and I am hoping to finally hunker down around here and get some planning for the fall done. I am back to school already with 2 of the girls and needing to prepare for all 5 of them come fall.

In prep for these trips, since I was not going to be on them working with the girls, I started a few years ago making covered notebook journals for the youth group girls , but this year, the group had grown so in size, I was not sure I was going to be able to tackle it for this trip. But I started to hear sweet little murmurrings from the girls about "Mrs Drietz, journals, and if she was making some for this trip"-well that is all it took to stoke up a desire already there to get them made! But I knew that I would have to settle on a bit more simple of a design if it was actually going to get finished. Deciding to not have them all be completely unique was not an easy thing to agree on for me, but it was much better than not having them at all for the girls. I was able to make each one different from the rest in the fabrics for the flowers I appliqued to each of them. So 21 journals in 3 days-and lots of prayer for these girls as they serve the Lord this next week. I think there has always been something in my personality that has needed to have something tangible in my hands when I pray for someone or something-it keeps me focused. Here is a few peeks at the finished journals. I was completely blessed when I went to the store to pick the composition notebooks for the journals and find that they were more than half off! Back to school just at the right time!