Tennis Tournament!

Hello again!

I hope you all are having a great week!  My week has been pretty good actually.  Even though "Valentine's week" isn't necessarily one of my favorite weeks of the year (ha!) ...I did manage to enjoy it anyway.  Kelly, I saw the Valentine's Day movie...I loved it and i "raised the roof" in my seat when that part came on when they talked about "muncie indiana"...booyah!  Something else that came to my mind this week during "valentine's week" was a little reminder from a card Darla gave me last year for Valentine's day....Darla, you encouraged me to remember how loved I am by Christ even though I might not necessarily have a "valentine" for the holiday and it just really blessed me alot last year and as I remembered that this year......so double thank you! 

Something you all could maybe pray about today for me and work if you think about it is tonight our youth group has a special get-to-know-you event with another youth group in Memphis from an organization called "Youth Visions".  This other youth group is from the inner city of Memphis and is predominately African American, and both of our youth group's leadership teams are getting together tonight for a cookout and game night in order to get to know each other better!  (sidenote: our kids are definitely HIGHer priviledged white kids that ALL but few go to private schools here that are unbelievable)  Anyway, the reason we are having this get-to know-you event is because eventually we are looking to partner with this youth group for the next 3 to 5 years in doing service projects together in Memphis.  Normally, our group participates in some sort of service project in Memphis once a month, but this year the Lord has put it on all our staff's hearts to also work on bringing more racial reconciliation to Memphis (b/c its still a major issue here) through our youth group AS we service...  soooo we have found this other AMAZING youth group and we want to do service TOGETHER!  It is sooooooo cool and we are all soooooo excited about it...but it is all still in the beginning stages...and we are just taking our time in order to let the Lord lead b/c we want it to be ALL through Him.  The things you could maybe pray for is that the high school leadership team has already had a few events with Youth Visions already, but tonight will be the 1st time for the Junior High to get a chance to start forming relationships with them.   (which the jr. high is who I work with)....so if you could just pray that the Holy Spirit would be present with us and that we would have just a great time in fellowship together in spite of there maybe being a few moments of ackwardness.  :-)  Ahhh...i'm excited though! 

The pictures I wanted to share with you all today are from a tennis tournament that I had a chance to go to yesterday on my day off...WOOT WOOT!  Every year Memphis has a pretty major tennis tournament that a lot of "big names" come to and yesterday one of my good friends from work randomly got 3 free box seat tickets and she invited me and amanda to come with her!  Sooo fun!  I've never been to anything like it...it was REALLY intense...but i absolutely loved it!  We saw part of a guys double match, and then we watched a 17 year old american girl (her name is melanie something) play a woman from sweden.  Also, another really cool thing is that ALOT of our students (from youth group) belong to tennis clubs and such here and were "ball kids" during these games...crazy, huh?  Anyway, here are the pics...  

LOVE YOU ALL!