Scattered

My mom had a dream last week in which I got run over by a 16 passenger van while I was standing in the middle of the road facing it down as if I could stop it in my own strength. My stare is pretty potent when it comes to keeping the kids in line, but when it comes to stopping vans dead in their tracks, it's mostly ineffective, or at least it was in my mom's dream. I can interpret this dream without employing any Jungian dream analysis whatsoever because it's so obvious. The 16 passenger van is the same van most churches have. I was totally getting flattened by my church in that dream. That pretty much sums up my summer. It also explains why my blogging has been irregular -- it's hard for me to muster up humor when I'm sad.

But today I heard a message about God "scattering" his people -- He's about "scattering" and not "gathering." So that hit home with me and I consider myself scattered as of today. And I can definitely see where God has been working this summer to make sure we see at least the preliminary unfolding of His plan for us in this next season of our walk with Him. So back to blogging.

It's been a busy weekend. Friday night, Dez, Amy, Lauren and I went to a benefit concert for the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking ("FCAHT"). I really had no idea what FCAHT actually did or that they even existed before Friday night and I have to say that I'm not real sure I have a much better idea after Friday night (it was a college-student organized event, so you've got to cut them some slack), but it was a fun event. There were four groups playing: Pam Affronti, Preson Phillips, Glasgow, and The Broken. I enjoyed all the musicians except for Glasgow (who was REALLY REALLY REALLY LOUD so I couldn't stay in the room -- so maybe they were great, I don't know; I felt like a really old lady standing out in the hallway watching them through the windows). This is Preson Phillips:

Can you see that hole in his guitar? It's right under where his fingers are. Dez tried to catch him after the show to ask him about his guitar's testimony, but he had already left. Preson is (I think) not only the worship leader at Watermark Church in Tampa, but also the pastor. That's got to be exhausting, so he probably went home early to rest up for Sunday.

Here are The Broken (should that be, here "is" The Broken? Grammatically, identifying bands is very confusing):

And here is the interpretive dancer that came out during the last song:

Lauren is convinced she wasn't actually with the band, but I'm pretty sure she was. She was very good but I have to tell you something about interpretive dance -- it makes me uncomfortable. I know it's a perfectly acceptable art form, even in church (or maybe especially in church), but seriously -- it seemed like she was looking right at me the entire time (okay, maybe not right when I took this picture, but the rest of the time for sure). It kind of creeped me out.

Friday night was memorable for another reason as well -- we felt very hip (do they say "hip" anymore?) to be hanging with such a young crowd, but it was the first time I've been a room full of adults and for the most part, I was old enough to be each person's mother.

We've also done our school shopping this weekend. Casey starts back to school on Wednesday and Mace is starting preschool the following Tuesday. Casey still has to do his summer reading and math assignments. He's read the books, but he still has to draw pictures about them. And I'm not even sure what his math assignment is, but I hope it doesn't have anything to do with money, because everything he learned in kindergarten about money has fallen right out of his head. At lunch after church today, he held up a nickel and asked me what coin it was. He guessed that it was a quarter, so I showed him a quarter and said, "No, this is a quarter; what are you holding? Is it a penny, a nickel, or a dime?" He said, "A dime?" I held up a dime and said, "No, this is a dime; what are you holding?" He said, "I think a penny's brown." I said, "Okay, so what are you holding?" (crickets chirping) I tried again, "It's worth 5 cents." Silence for several seconds, then "A nickel?" Hopefully, identifying money is not at the top of the list of things they're supposed to have down-pat before going into first grade and identifying the various Wolverine characters is.

(Casey's Wolverine. Mace is Invisidude.)

And I think poor Mace is color blind. Grandpa Ray is color blind, so there's definitely a genetic link to it in our family. We go over colors quite a bit but he can no more identify red and green to save his life. For a while he was just saying everything was green and now he alternates between green and purple. He never ever guesses that something is red. I can't think of any other reason that he could identify the types of trucks in a book (dump, cement, monster, etc.) but not identify the colors that those trucks are after having looked at them so many times and heard their colors over and over again. We'll see, but I have a feeling that preschool this year will confirm not only that the boy is left handed, but also color-blind. I'll have to teach him to read before he gets to kindergarten so that he will be able to read the color labels on the crayons -- otherwise, he'll flunk all his Saxon Math worksheets.