Christmas 2006 at the Gattis House

I thought you might like to see first hand how much fun we had at Christmas. Thanks to everyone for joining us. What a grand day!

Mary Haisten Comes to Visit

Mamack and I had a delightful little girl visiting with us over the weekend. Even though she is only two going on three, she was extremely well behaved; a little lady in every respect. We were both amazed at how she had grown. She was smart and mature and just as nice as she could be. We really enjoyed her.

As you can see from this picture, she dresses like a lady at all times; no sloppy shorts, tee shirts, or cut-off jeans for her. She's straight out of the Victorian era. She loved her colorful skirt and seemed aware of how the colors blended with the grass and the flowers. She is very visual, and likes colorful things.

Mamack took her shopping on Saturday and she had definite ideas about the dresses she wanted to buy. She picked both of them out and was very firm about the things she liked and the things she didn't like. As you can see, she already knows how to accent her best qualities, an ability I understand is most important for a young lady.

On Sunday, we took her to dinner with Nana, Courtney, Tammi, and Kathie. Kathie had made arrangements for us to eat at the country club. Mary Haisten was very firm: she did not want a high chair or a booster chair. She prefered to sit in a regular chair like all of the "other" adults. And she sat there just like a little lady; no trouble whatsoever. For awhile she did sit in Tammi's lap and played with Tammi's necklace, but she was so good. We were all very proud of her and amazed at her grace and charm.

She seemed to enjoy helping Mamack water the flowers each evening and wondered why I wasn't out there with them. On Saturday night she came back inside and asked me to come out to help. I suppose she is going to be a gardner herself someday. She brought in a little bouquet of flowers she had picked that night and she and Mamack put them in a vase.

I noticed that she didn't really like to be by herself. On Sunday morning, I woke up to find her in the middle of our bed. She is so little that she got lost in that big place. Then on Sunday afternoon when we were all taking a nap, she decided that she needed to take her nap with us. She did sleep for a long time, even after we had gotten up. Her Sunday school teachers said that she had a great time and she must have played really hard.

How we loved her visit! We hope she will come again soon.

More Than Enough - John 6:1-15

I believe it was a Thursday afternoon.....lunch time. Thursdays are my days off and I stay at home with the kids while Amy works. And wouldn’t you know that the weirdest things happen with the kids when I am at home with them, by myself. It was lunch time and there was only one more piece of pizza in the refrigerator. When I asked everyone what they wanted everyone said: Pizza! What to do? How am I going to multiply one piece of pizza to feed three hungry kids? I kinda wished then that I had the power of Jesus so that after all were fed and satisfied I would have enough pizza for me as well. Pizza is my favorite too!
It seems that in many parts of our life we do not have more than enough. When it gets towards the end of the month and Amy and I are looking at our checking account we don’t have more than enough. When I’m driving down the interstate going to a conference meeting I soon find out that I don’t have more than enough gas to get there and on the larger front we are beginning to see from the price of gas that our world does not have more than enough oil to satisfy our cars and vans and SUVs. When it is getting towards the end of the day and I still have a lot of things on my to do list, I find that there is not more than enough time to get those things done. In our world we know that there is a limit to everything that goes on in our life.
That is what the disciples faced when they were looking at feeding all those people. In today’s lesson, Jesus is on a mountainside with his disciples. The Jewish Passover Feast is near. He looks up and sees a great crowd coming up the mountain. A small army really. Five thousand men, and an untold number of women and children. That’s kind of scary. How are they going to take care of all those people?
We’ve got the Tennessee Wesleyan back to school concert coming up in a few weeks. We’re preparing for about 300 people. What do you think would happen if five thousand people showed up? We would be scurrying around, probably in a panic. That is what the disciples are feeling about all this. They are probably beginning to get into a panic. But, Jesus had it all under control. Jesus didn’t panic. He turns to his disciple Philip and asks, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” The writer of John says that he asked this only to test Philip, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
Philip answered, “Eight months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!” Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” As far as the disciples were concerned, the problem was resources. They didn’t have enough. Jesus knew better. What they had was not a resource problem, but a faith problem.
Is that not what we run into when we begin to get worried about things? We know there are not going to be enough resources, so why worry about that? What we need to be focusing on is the question of faith. Not necessarily faith in that God is going to land a pile of cash in our laps, or give us more time to do things, or even remove the cancer in our bodies. Because if we expected that from our faith to do those things, then we are going to be very upset when those things do not happen. Upset with ourselves and upset with God.
When we look at the Scripture I just read; the story of the feeding of the five thousand, it’s easy for us to focus directly on the miracle. And we’ll even focus on it so much that we will try to figure out how Jesus did it. Maybe they broke off the bread into very small pieces. Maybe some of the people weren’t hungry so they didn’t eat. Maybe there really were not five thousand people. We could go on and on with the maybes. On and on until we make ourselves dizzy.
You see, we’ll do that because that is what we do with other people. We’ll go on and on with people to try and prove them wrong. I never was one for debate. I had class mates in high school who could debate for hours and hours on any subject you give them. I found it as kind of a waste of time. I had better things to do and more fun things to do than sit and argue about subjects. We have our general election coming up in a few weeks and we starting to see the debates come out from the candidates. There they are trying to prove why the other candidate is not fit for the job. It can even get a little nasty and down right petty. “So and so should not be a senator because he has not served in the military.” “So and so is not telling the truth in his commercials.” And then later, the only thing the candidate says is: “I approve this message.” We think we are always right and even if we are not we have a hard time admitting it. Instead, we go on and on trying to prove things wrong.
The same thing goes for our Christianity. Instead of worrying about how things happened, how Jesus did things, whether or not certain situations occurred, we need to look at the example Jesus and/or the Scripture writer is trying to tell us that points to the bigger picture of the Lordship of Jesus; that Jesus is the Son of God; that through Jesus we have what we need to be children of God and inherit the Kingdom of God. All the other stuff doesn’t matter. All of the other stuff is just stories and examples.
One problem we run into is this issue of skepticism. We live in a skeptical world. A world full of fact and truth. Skeptics think like that. Nothing ever changes. TAKE GRAVITY. Heavy objects fall toward the earth. Always. So a builder can construct a house and never worry about his materials floating away. Count on it. TAKE CHEMISTRY. Mixing certain elements in precise proportions yields the same result. Always. So a doctor can prescribe a medication with predictable confidence. TAKE ASTRONOMY. The sun, the moon, those stars work in perfect harmony. Always. Even the mysterious eclipse comes as no surprise. TAKE ANATOMY. Whether it's the pupil of the eye expanding and contracting in response to light or our skin regulating our body temperature or our built-in defense mechanism fighting disease, we operate strictly on the basis of facts. Hard, immutable, stubborn facts. Reliable as the sunset. Real as a toothache. Absolute, unbending, undeniable.
And the disciples say, "Jesus, what do you mean, give them something to eat? We have only five small loaves of bread and two fish. Those are the facts. Five and two. No more, no less. Send the five thousand people home; we can't take care of them today."
If we let the skeptical, factual, resource minded way of the world control our lives, the same thing will happen in our spirituality. “We don’t have enough room, send them away.” “We don’t have enough money, let them go without food.” “We don’t have enough time, let them find someone else.” I see it happen, even in my own office. Because we live today with the limitation of resources.
But that is not what Jesus taught. For he wanted our faith to overcome our resources. He even tells us that if we have the faith of a mustard seed, then we can move mountains. Now, does he really mean that we can move a mountain? No. But, he does mean that we can do some remarkable things. Faith can change lives.
The summer camping season is coming to an end and our kids had a lot of fun this year at Camp Lookout. Bradley had the privelidge of attending a couple of sessions this year (his first year). He absolutely loved it and is already looking forward to going a whole week next year. Camp is where I believe faith moves mountains. Don Washburn, our director at Camp Lookout, has stories every year of changed lives. One such story came directly to the director of Holston Conference Camping Ministries, Randy Pasqua.
A mother wrote in to tell us about her child who came to camp this summer. She started the letter by saying that her child had some depression/anxiety problems due to a number of reasons and that her child had a lot of anger problems. She went into more detail about the child’s problems but the overall story was that he had faced a lot of hard times and had a lot of negative emotion as a result of it. She then proceeded to say that she decided to take her child off of his medication before coming to camp. That can make any camp director have a heart attack! She went on into the letter saying that her child had a wonderful time at camp, did not even need the medication, and that something happened in the week that change her son’s life. He no longer has the anxiety/depression or anger attacks. He has gone back to being a normal child. Her words in her letter was that “her child has been healed.”
There wasn’t enough time for people to reach out to that child. There wasn’t enough money to get the child the professional help he probably needed. There wasn’t enough medication that could make him better. But, there was more than enough grace, more than enough faith, more than enough love to help him recover. And now he is healed.
In a world that constantly tells us that there is not enough, Christ is there and he is saying, “through me, there is more than enough.”

Looking Toward the Weekend

Well, just finished the sermon for Sunday. I will post it after this blog if you would like to take and look and leave comments. I will work on it a little more Saturday night as I do each week. Also finished up my revisions to my first ordination question. Thanks to dad and Jim for the helpful comments. It looks like it may be a pretty quiet weekend. Bradley is going to spend the night with a friend tonight, I have a funeral with Mike in the morning. Other than that, just normal weekend stuff. Amy and I have started season 3 of 24 so I'm sure we will be watching quite a bit of that this weekend. What an awesome show! Dad, you would love it! Jack is in over his head once again with some major bioterrorism going on. If Amy likes it you know it's got to be good!
Anyone chosen any dates for our trip? I agree with dad about July. It's usually pretty open but sure is darn hot! It has been miserable here today. Thank goodness Mayfield did a Ice Cream on the Square day. They had free ice cream and we voted for which new flavor we liked the best. I think mine is Extreme Moose Tracks. You can't get any better than Mayfield Ice Cream!
I guess that's about enough for now. Not too exciting, huh? Look at dates and let me know.

Summer Adventure

I thought you might like some pictures on the web of Bradley at Summer Adventure. One of the ladies in the church walked around shooting pictures all week. She sent me these two pictures of Bradley in the craft room. He made some good friends, as always, and had a really good time. When we attended the closing yesterday, I wished that I had brought the video camera. He was right up in the front and did a great job with all of the hand signs for the songs they learned. I could have gotten some good shots. I'll have to work harder on these photo ops.

Courtney is picking him up a little before 1:30 so that he can go with him to get a haircut. I have a wedding at 3 so I'll need to be at the church around 2 in order to get everything ready. Since Mom and Nana are going to Alexander City for the big party, I guess that I'll be "Home Alone" tonight. If you let me know when Courtney and Bradley get there we can do an IChat on your Mac so he can see what we are talking about. I wonder if you can do three way IChats with those things?

Have you found out anything about whether or not Courtney can use .mac with his PC? I suppose we could just try it with one of our PCs and see if it works. I might give that a try later this afternoon when I get back from the wedding.

We are getting a nice gentle rain today. We really needed it. My grass has been so dry and this should perk things up for awhile. Apparently we are have yellow jacket problems all over the south this year. The guy who does the grounds for the association got into one yesterday and they ran him into the lake. They bit him everywhere. Be careful with those things!

We have really enjoyed Bradley this week. He is such a delightful little guy. We would love to see a picture or two of Nick's first steps.

I like the way Courtney has set the picture as his image for the blogg. I worked on mine a little bit in IPhoto and came up with one just for me. I'll be glad to do a similar one for each of you, though Jason could do as good a job with his IPhoto. Be sure to duplicate the photo, though, since IPhoto does away with the original unlike PhotoShop Album. I think I can get this into my picture place, but Court may need to help me with that.

By the way, Court, sorry about the bad day yesterday. I'm glad you are going to spend a few days with your brother and his family. They are very supportive people who are good at helping someone who has had a bad day. I can't believe what that lady said to you. Amy bakes really good cakes too.

Thursday's at Daddy Charles' House

Thursday is my off day too, but I did have to go into the church this morning. This is Summer Adventure Week and I had to speak to the kids; that, of course, is why Brad is with us anyway. I thought you might like this picture of that very nice family that visited us this past week when they brought Brad to stay with us. Brad has been back to the pool every day this week. He has had a ball!

I was given the theme of salvation for my morning talk with the children. Their theme for the day was, "Jesus is my savior," so I tried to help them understand what a savior is. The movie, Cars, that we saw last night came in very handy. I talked about heros who save the day for people. Then I asked how many of them had seen Cars already; would you believe most of them had seen it? Anyway, I described all that Lightening sacrificed in order to help the people of the little town. He came there to live among them and began to love them. And in the end, he gave up something very sigificant in order to make their lives much better. Then I talked about how Jesus does the same thing for us. I thought it worked out well and I would not have had the reference if Jason had not loaned us that special little guy this week.

By the way, Judy was just telling me that there was a grandfather with his grandson at the pool this afternoon. Brad spent a lot of time playing with the man's grandson, and when the man left, he said to Judy, "You have a really sweet young man there." She said, "We sure do." He got the good citizenship award today at Bible school and has fit in well with the whole class. We have had over three hundred children each day; I felt bad that we had to turn down forty-five kids who wanted to register because we didn't have enough teachers and supplies. Jane told me later, however, that all these mom's registered way to late and that we had already taken several kids after the registration date had passed.

I did my time cutting the grass today too. I had cut it on Monday, but it was so high from my neglect over the previous ten days that I left piles of dead grass all over the lawn. I used the bagger to pick up that grass and cut it again today. It looks much better but I still have to get it edged. That takes almost as long as it does to cut it. Courtney will be happy to know that I took the edger into the shop this week to have a new blade put on.

I'm getting excited about the trip. We could do August, depending on when mom and I have our trip to Alaska. The travel agent is working to book it, but hasn't been able to get the new schedule yet. Hopefully we'll know something about that in a few weeks. The RL is great on trips; shows you all the restaurants and the places to stay along the way and even has phone numbers so you can call ahead and make reservations. It also does a pretty good job keeping up with road construction on the Interstates Highways. I'll get the latest update this fall so that we can be ready for next summer. Mine is already two years old, but still very servicable. We had a great time with with it when we went to Borea. Actually, that might be a good first stop for us to stay at the College in Borea and look at the craft shops there. It's an interesting place. Then we can follow the historic Cumberland Gap from Kentucky to Pennsylvania, then head over to the Atlantic Seaboard through Pennsylvania to Annapolis and down again to Williamsburg before turning east to Charlottesville and the Shanandoah Valley. We might spend another night in Covington. We would have a great time, tough we would need to pack light so we don't have so much to take inside. Mac's will be a must so we can keep in touch with home, maybe with a blog we do for the girls and kids. I like to have breakfast at the motel (for free), then picnic for lunch along the way. We then eat a big supper at a nice restaurant or pub. All that saves a lot of money.

Court will be pleased to know that I have found another couple for his class. I was asked to do a wedding for a couple his age; 29 and 30. I asked if she was interested in a Sunday school class and she wrote back that she was very interested. They want to attend the 11 o'clock service and had been looking for a good class in that age group. I think we are building a pretty good group and we need to have a get-together soon; I might even cook pizzas again. What do you think?

I hope Jason can keep his .mac acount and might be willing to help with some finances; perhaps go halfs. It could be a good meeting place and I am beginnig to really enjoy it. The training places are very helpful and we can do so much more sharing pictures, films, etc. of the family and the kids. I think it might be worth the price.

We really enjoyed the movie last night and hope we can meet Courtney and Tammi again for movies; maybe even set aside one night every month or every two weeks as Gattis night at the movies. The new Rave Theatre is pretty close to both of us and it's nice to meet there. It was great fun. I wish those Tennessee Gattises were a little closer.

We'll be thinking about Jason; by himself tomorrow with two kids. I'm not sure his father could handle it.

.Mac Account

My trial is starting to come to a close and I have an idea about membership. Maybe we should try the family account. Here is the link so you can read up on it.
http://www.mac.com/1/family_pack_tm.html

Court, you would be able to take advantage of this if and when you get a Mac. I'm real eager to get some of the movies I've made up to share and there's really no other way to do it. I believe that with the family account we would have 1 master account and 4 submasters. I think that with each submaster you could use it as a way to get into ichat and upload whatever you would like to upload onto the server. Check it out and see what you think. This way it would only cost each of us $90 instead of $100.

Home Alone.....Well, Almost

Welcome to our Tennessee Country Club! That is what I call our little pool we have in the back yard. It's not much but Haisey sure does love it.
Well, Amy is leaving me today for a couple of days while she goes down to visit with Heather in Birmingham. That means I have the two younger ones all to myself. What are we going to do! Thankfully they are down for a nap right now and I have some time to do a little blogging and movie making. I'm about finished with Nick's birthday party movie and will share with you when it is done. I think it's pretty cute.
Sitting here watching Cosby Show - it is so much funnier now that I have kids of my own! It was funny when we were little but I have a different look at it now. Just saw a preview for a new Robin Williams spooky movie (why is he doing scary ones now?): The Night Listener. Looks interesting.
We spent the morning playing outside and watching PBS. Fun! Fun! Fun! I'm not sure what we will do this afternoon but it should be exciting like everything else is around here!
For the past three weeks I have not mowed my yard for two main reasons. 1. I really have not had the time with camp, Huntsville trip, evening meetings and appointments, and normal church stuff. But, the more important reason is because of the yellow jacket nests. Already this summer I have found two nests. They are not fun when they get a hold of you! I usually get stung four or five times a year. Well, I finally broke down and mowed this morning and made it through unscathed. I found one last night and gased them but they were still pretty active this morning so I just avoided them. If any of you two would like to come up and mow next time you are more than welcome. I have plenty of Benadryl and sting ointment!
I guess that is enough posting for today. Just a few things going on with me. I hope you two are having a good day.
Once again, let me know about this trip you are speaking of. I really don't know what you are talking about!

Everybody is On Board

Great! Everybody is on board now. I wanted the picture to be posted all the time and not just as one post. I have made both of my exceptionally bright sons administrators, which means, I suppose, that you can do posts like this anytime you want and/or that you can do anything you would like. Can either of you figure out how to get the picture of us in the corner or so that it stays on the web page? I con't have the foggiest.

Jason, you can put in Keith's web page. I couldn't find it and it took several tries for me to get mine in place. I would like to have it listed.

Sounds Good!

Yes, I think I like this one better. I'm lost on one thing. What trip are you speaking of? Are you taking us all to England or something? That would be great! If that won't work Bradley has been dying to go to New York and Disney World. Aren't the grandparents supposed to do a Disney World trip first anyway? I believe that is what Nana and Grandaddy did. Court and Tammi will have to hurry up and have kids to join us.

Keep up the posts. This will be fun!

Starting the Blogg

Ok guys. This is the beginning of a new thing for me; trying to get into the new decade. I haven't conquered text messaging yet, but I am trying out the blogg. Hurry up and join and let me know what you think about the trip next year. I thought this would be a fun way to pass on pictures, keep in touch and get our trip planned. I wanted to try the one that Jason started a few weeks ago but couldn't get back into the site after I lost the information. Consequently, I decided to start a new one and see if we could do it. Notice the name; thought I would protect our identity. Nobody has any idea who George and Herber are, so you should be save from terrorist, etc.

Do you think I should add mom so that she won't feel left out? I doubt seriously that she could traverse the mine field to get a membership but she might feel honored that we ask her. Not only that, but if she did get on the web site, she might even have a comment or two. Let me know what you think.

I plan to do some other blogg; perhaps to ascertain questions the congregation is asking about sermons and to see what they are thinking.

BTW, Court, I had a nice visit with Brent and Lori today. Delightful couple; I will enjoy being a part of this special time in their lives.