Dad came to Springfield Drury University Dixie , a Dalmatian mix who he sometimes calls Velvet. He spends quiet days at home (with Dixie ) and raucous weekends with our family and friends.
Pictures above were taken during Thanksgiving weekend. Kitti's sister, Keri Kimbriel, and her family came from Denver. Our good friends, the Cooks, joined us too. Good time, had by all.
2 comments:
Hey there, fellow Maxsons! Thanks for letting me know about this blog.
Uncle Jimmie, I recently heard from Annetta Searer and she asked about you. Since I hadn't heard anything recently, it was on my mind to try to find you and get caught up on things. Now Rick has done that for me and I will pass the address for this blog on to Annetta. I'm not sure if she will be able to follow through or not but at least she can read about what you are up to.
We are well but, as is often the case, too busy. As you may remember, Sherri has been the pianist for our church for quite some time now and then this past summer, our youth minister left just before the long-scheduled summer camp experience for the youth. The camp was to be help at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and was planned and run by the AZ Southern Baptist Convention for the youth from any and all SBC churches in Arizona so it wasn't a matter of running the camp. But each church group that sent its youth had to send some adult counselors along with them. So the pastor asked Sherri if she would go along and lead the contingent of about 30 youth and 3 or 4 other laypeople who help out with the youth program at our church.
To make a long story short(er), she did, they had a great time, she bonded with many of the teenagers, and, when they got back, the pastor asked the church to hire her part-time as the youth coordinator. Even with two part-time jobs, it was not supposed to be more than half-time but, as is usually the case in church work, part-time becomes fulltime, even without fulltime pay!
And they know, of course, that if they hired her they would get me too -- at no extra charge! So youth ministry has become our life -- hers pretty much fulltime and mine on weekends and Wednesday nights. But these kids (Jr. High and High School) kind of grow on you and we find ourselves sadly marveling at the world they live in and wanting to do what we can to make it a little better and give them some resources to cope and to succeed.
While ours is pretty much a middle class church, there is also a large blue-collar working class contingent and the church has long had an outreach ministry to a nearby trailer park. That makes for a very diverse group of youth and their background and needs vary greatly. Family events like divorce and re-marriage cut across all socio-economic lines as do things like school violence, bullying, and parents in Iraq or Afghanistan. Depression, "cutting," and suicide ideation are ongoing issues for several as are the perennial conflicts with parents who "just don't understand." Anyway, that's what we are dealing with and it would be impossible if it were not for the saving grace of Jesus and the fact that we serve a God of second (and third, and fourth) chances.
I may have told you or you may have heard that Grand Canyon University almost went bankrupt 3 years ago and we were "bought" by a group of private investors who turned us into a for-profit university and rapidly expanded our online programs to the point where we now have about 10,000 students taking online courses and just about 1200 traditional students taking courses on campus. Initially, the Christian nature of the university was informally down-played in order not to "offend" none-believers who might want to take courses online but were themselves not religious. The campus programs and atmosphere remained decidedly Christian. This schizophrenic state continued for the first couple years but recently our accrediting group more or less called us on it. They said that we need to decide what we are and then prove to them that we are that across the board. The owners decided to re-emphasize the Christian nature of the school and start re-introducing this into the online curriculum as it has always been in the campus courses. This was a great relief for me because, although I wanted to stay in Phoenix and keep on working for GCU, it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. I still don't feel that I have found my niche with the new organization but I am encouraged that they want to return to the philosophy of the "old GCU." For them, it was as much a business decision as anything else because most of them have no background in Christian higher education and are only minimally involved in church or any other type of Christian ministry. They now see that they can make the Christian aspect of the university a "distinctive" that will draw Christian students rather than repell students. So there is still a disconnect between the personal beleifs and practices of the owners and those of the campus faculty. But there is a group of us who continue to hope (and pray) that God will work a miracle in their hearts just as he did in the university's finances. (They turned around the finances of the university in just under 2 years and are now making a profit. That profit will only continue to grow as the online programs expand rapidly.)
Well, that's enough for now. If you ever come through Phoenix, we'd love to see you.
Charlie and Sherri
Beautiful family pictures. I surfed on in from 'Common Places'. All the best.
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