Great weekend

I was fortunate enough to spend this past weekend with three lovely young ladies from my church. I took Kylee, Jennifer and Kennedy to a Youth Encounter weekend in Wisconsin Dells. They were SO great!!! I knew that they were "good kids" before I left, but now I REALLY know what great "kids" they are. Their parents have done an awesome job raising them to be respectful...something that, frankly, a lot of parents aren't very good at these days. I had a great time getting to know them better and just hanging out with them in general. The funny thing is (and I could be way off-base on this) that I think they actually had a fun time with me, too. The weekend included some great music, a great speaker, great workshops, lots of noise, a fun church group from Tomah, Melody putting a pastor in his place (more on that later), and great music. The band Captive Free was the house band. The guest musician for the weekend was this awesome singer/guitar player/song writer named Lloyd Garrelts. Funny thing is that Lloyd and I are good friends from college. I knew he was going to be at this particular Quake, so that's why I chose to attend this one. Lloyd and I sang in a contemporary Christian band called Living Water for two years while we were in college. Those two years were so much fun!! Now the REALLY cool thing is that Lloyd ended up marrying one of my floormates (Tonya). Tonya and Lloyd's twin sister Lynn were roommates all four years at Concordia. Lloyd and Tonya never dated in college. They really didn't start dating until they had been out of college for quite some time. It's a great story and it just seems so normal that they ended up together. So....Tonya was with Lloyd this weekend and I got to do lots of catching up with her, too. The sad thing is that I've lived in the Twin Cities area for 6 years now and Lloyd and Tonya have lived in Minneapolis for longer than that. I'm so sad that we haven't gotten together before now, but we're going to change that and get together now. I hope it's often because I really love both of them and would like to spend time with them. I have pictures of the weekend, but I haven't gotten them on the computer yet, so I'll post them when I can.

Time for bed, but before I turn off the computer I'm asking for prayers for my cousin Jay. Jay is just 6 months older than me. We were really, really close when we were growing up. He and his family lived just a few blocks from us so we always did stuff together. I just found out yesterday that Jay found out last week that he has skin cancer. He doesn't know much more about it, but he'll be heading down to Madison this week for more tests and stuff like that. Please keep him in your prayers. I'll keep you posted.