Congratulations Brenda!

Many years ago I lived in the rolling hills of Northeast Oklahoma in the great city of Tulsa. My dad was the Minister of Music at Eastwood Baptist Church. It was back in the day of huge youth groups and even bigger youth choirs. There were hundreds - and I mean that literally - in our youth choir. We made lots of friends and went on singing/mission tours and had small ensembles that traveled around singing at revivals... It was great.

When you are active in your youth group you make life-long friends. It has been so much fun being on Facebook and reconnecting with people I haven't seen in twenty years. But somehow - I don't remember right now - before Facebook took off, I had already found some old friends. One of them is Brenda. Cheryl and I moved away from Tulsa when our children were little, but before that I have pictures of Brenda and Richard and Mary and David and Tom and Debbie and so many others at ensemble rehearsals and concerts and holding our babies. It was a really great time in our lives.

Then, when we lived in Denver one of our friends from Tulsa ended up marrying the brother of one of our Denver choir members. (I'm not going with the old cliche "It's a small world" but you can hum it in the background if you want.)

Well... all of that to introduce our winner. If you have been reading along, you know that the person to get to hit 40,000 on the counter down there at the bottom of the page would be our winner. I got a message on Facebook and here on the blog from Brenda H. One of our old friends from Tulsa who later was my dad's secretary and a great choir/ensemble member and friend and she's the one that married the guy who's brother was in Denver. I'm glad she won. She's been a faithful reader of our worship blog for a year or so.

I hope all of this is making sense because I still have a lot of drugs trying to kill off the acute bronchitis and I'm trying real hard to not fall asleep while I type this.

I have an early Christmas present for our 40,000th hit. A little Christmas stained-glass panel. It has pretty swirled green glass and an etched bevel in the middle. (Brenda, I'll get your address on Facebook.)

30,000 hits! soon!

Oh my! I was going to mention this earlier, but since I was out of town Friday and Saturday at the East Tennessee State Handbell Festival I didn't get this posted, but we are just a few hits away from number 30,000! Wow!

As usual, there will be a prize for number 30,000. Just leave a comment and I'll get your prize to you.

I never posted the winner of our 20,000th hit. Here she is - Phyllis - receiving her prize. It's an original painting by yours truly (where did that I phrase originate? I'll have to check into that.)

Well, anyway, I was trying to think of a good prize for 20,000 and I knew that Phyllis collects miniature paintings and so I decided to paint her one. I wasn't sure what to paint for 20,000 when I thought of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. So on the painting are two little orange fish and if you look toward the bottom of the painting you'll see 20,000 in the seaweeds.