Au revoir des amis AND hello goldfish

This morning I stopped by the hotel to say goodbye to our 7 friends from New Jersey and Florida who came to help at our church's Open Doors event. For the last 5 weeks, we've welcomed both sets of our parents, as well as these 2 groups. It's been great, but Nicole and I are both tired. The current ministries that we both have entail lots of people contact and hospitality to friends from near and far. We enjoy people, but we need our down time alone as well.

At the Ateliers d'Artistes de Belleville weekend, the theme was "water." One creative decorating idea at our church that I loved was having goldfish swimming around in small vases in our sanctuary. The position of the vases was changed at each event.

For some reason, both are kids love watching fish. Maybe it's because of the movie Nemo...or because of Dorothy on Sesame Street. When we were in New Jersey last fall, we discovered a wonderful Chinese restaurant that had a small aquarium. We ate there often. But there were times when we would just go in so they could see the fish.

After today's weekly staff meeting and lunch, I claimed 3 of the goldfish. They survived the bumpy bus ride home without me dropping them. The kids certainly are happy to watch them here. I guess these are the first pets that Nicole and I have had in our married lives. Now we need to figure out how to take care of them.

The themes of fish and fishing are in the Bible. So they'll probably be a blog about them sometime.