The past few days ...

It's been a quiet few days here around the Jones Junction. We received a phone call during dinner Tuesday night that deeply saddened us. Do you remember the gentleman I told you about last year who was working on the film to refute the stuff in the DaVinci Code? Luke was a member of our LOGOS class. His wife died about 18 months ago from a rare blood disease. His family was only starting to recover from her loss -- but Luke had a heart attack and went home to the with the Lord Tuesday. We are not sad for him, but for his children -- and us! I have not met many people in this world with his integrity, his love for people and the Lord, and his humility. Luke's funeral is not until Monday; there are many family members traveling cross-country who can't make it any sooner.

Wednesday after exercise class, Angela (the instructor) and I had opportunity to talk with two women who don't know the Lord. Carmella (from Italy) is married to a Muslim but is herself a disgruntled Catholic. Boneta (from Senegal) is Muslim, along with her whole family. Boneta's daughter, interestingly, goes to school with Luke's daughter, Vida. They are in a musical production together at their high school this week. Vida has a lead role and decided her father would want her to "go on with the show", so she has. Thankfully, Luke had gone to her dress rehearsal Monday night because he was supposed to be out of town the rest of the week and so would have missed the performances. Boneta said her daughter was really upset for Vida, losing her mom and dad so closely. Angela and I had opportunity to share the gospel with both of these ladies, and it was a real blessing.

I had received an e-mail from Jesse earlier in the week. He gave me some instructions as to how to open an account where he and I could kind of instant-message each other if we wanted. I tried to install the program yesterday, but naturally ran into difficulty (because this is computer stuff and I just really do not get it). I had also tried to upload some cool fonts to my computer yesterday and failed.

So I petitioned Mr. Jones to see if he could be of assistance with both of these endeavors today. I am happy to say that genius Jones came through on both accounts. I have some really nice new fonts to play with, and I was able to connect to Jesse and have a real LIVE conversation with him, as well as SEE him! I may hate computers, but I'm not going to knock the result.

It was so nice to see and talk to Jesse today. He sounded so good. We talked back and forth for about 15 minutes. Dylan happened to stop by just at the same moment I was on-line to Jesse, so Dylan got to see him too. Isn't that so amazing that Jesse can be thousands of miles away, but yet I can actually see him? It was very fun to watch the expressions on his face as we talked.
He actually "walked" me around his container and showed me all the cool stuff in his part of it. See the cute Christmas tree Diana sent him? I told Jesse to smile because I was taking his picture. It's pretty difficult to get any kind of quality picture when aiming a camera at a computer with just a very small image, but I did want all of you to be able to see his smiling face today!

This is a recent picture of Nana and Roy. They were over a few days ago and I snapped some pictures of them. Roy is doing very well after his stint placement. He says he feels really good. We were all supposed to have dinner here on Thanksgiving. Plan A was that Dylan was going to bring a few students home with him for the weekend -- kids who couldn't get home for the brief holiday. But as it turns out, no one needed any housing and my sister invited us to come to her house for the day. So Mr. Jones, Dylan and I, along with Nana and Roy, are going to take a trip to Detroit for Thanksgiving -- just for the day. I'm going to make my very delicious pumpkin spice cake, and Nana is bringing the pumpkin pies. My sister is an amazing cook ... I am so looking forward to this!