Lots of changes

Obviously, I've not written in quite a while and I'm not even going to apologize this time :)  There has been so much going on in my life that I just could express all my thoughts in words yet.  Also, many things I WANTED to write about, just weren't something I want the whole world to read...

First big change, CJ and I have left our home church, Burlington First Church of the Nazarene.  And because of that (somewhat because of that at least) I have lost my job as janitor.  This decision has been a huge one that has taken a lot of my mental energy I would like to use for other things. (including blogging/journaling)  One of the main reasons I've not written about this is because, I'm not going to publicly share the reasons why.  There were conflicts and we disagreed with how things were being handled.  We had felt God leading us to leave for awhile but my job held us there, so we wouldn't even truly consider it.  Then there were the conflicts mentioned earlier and we knew God was "kicking us out".  It was clear.  It was very sad to leave.  I grew up in that church. CJ and I were married there and Dani was dedicated there as well.  So many memories...

Three weeks ago, my grandmother died.  That, of course, was very hard.  I've never lost a grandparent.  It sucks.  Although, my grandma was 96, sick and so ready to go home to the father of her children (he died before I was born) and her two children who went before her, it still sucked.  I found out I'd lost my job one week and the next, she died.  I had a very emotional two weeks to say the least.  The visitation was extremely hard.  I just didn't want to be there.  There were very many well-meaning people who came to support me and my family but many of them asked about the church, why we left and if we were ok with it.  I just couldn't deal.  I didn't want to talk about it, I felt so betrayed and hurt. I just wanted to focus on Grandma.  I pretty much avoided most everybody until I left.  The funeral was good however.  Hard, but good.  I only really broke twice.  Once when a conversation I had with her in the hospice house was mentioned (I didn't know that was coming) and when my cousin read the Christmas story.  I know, I know, why did he read it?  Let me explain...  Every Christmas my Grandma made us read the Christmas story from Luke before we ever did anything else at our family's get-together. She made one of the 4 pastors/grandsons (depending on who was there) read it from her KJV red letter Bible.  Every year we heard it, from the time we were babies.  Never skipped it.  Many of us cousins were talking at the visitation about how that's one our favorite memories of get-togethers and how we would miss that now that we probably would only see each other at reunions and such.  We decided that we had to hear it one last time...  I cried through the whole thing.  My brother, Donnie, actually did her funeral.  I admired him for it.  I couldn't have done it.  If you want to read a beautiful sermon about a wonderful woman here is a link to his blog where he posted the sermon in full.  A few things changed as he read it but the content is pretty much identical.

There are many more things going on but those have been the two biggest changes/events lately.  I'll blog more soon about others.