Nadine's new look (365-35)

Well, it's been a long time coming, and today was the day! After school we took Nadine to the salon and had her hair cut! We were going to go with a pixie cut, but the stylist thought she was too blonde for that. We may still if we end up not liking this cut, but it is adorable and it makes a great pic of the day!

Hope Community hosted the District Sunday School Teacher's Appreciation dinner this evening, being that I am a Sunday School teacher, Rob and I were invited to the event. It was catered by Spaghetti Warehouse and we had cheesecake for dessert! Our teens served us our meals and cleared our tables. They also performed for us. They are going to BLAST in March and hoping that this performance will take them all the way to regionals in June. Jourdyn is a part of this, although it's impossible to tell who she is. (She makes part of the U and the L!)

This was choreographed by one of our teens, Alex and one of our college kids, Ana! It's phenomenal!

The keynote speaker this evening was Rick Harvey, a pastor from Cincinnati. Rick spoke about the most important things in our lives. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was He responded "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'

We try to make our journey so tough these days. We add clutter and we frankly tend to be self-absorbed. God never intended it to be that way. The most important thing to Him, really the only thing that ultimately matters is loving God (being in relationship with Him) and loving others the same way we love ourselves (being in relationship with others.) It's not the loving others that gets us. It's the loving others the same way we love ourselves that's hard. We take care of ourselves. We make sure we are fed and clothed, that we have the latest and greatest things, that all our needs are met. Yet when it comes to others we most often give them our scraps. For example, hearing about a need for food, and instead of giving the same we would eat, we clean out our pantries and give the things that we've refused to eat. (Sometimes things that are expired, but hey, if they're really hungry they'll eat it)

The greatest commandment is love God. The second greatest is to love others. That's it, yet we get so caught up in the things that Jesus himself didn't care to count as the most important.