Great Weekend!

We took a road trip to Ouray and Montrose on Sunday. It was great to get out and see more of Colorado! As well as box stores and people. ;) In Ouray we went to the hot springs and checked out the ice park. We all came to the conclusion that we would not like to ice-climb. It seems like too much work to be cold and the possibility of ice chunks falling down sounds no fun. But it was fun to watch...for awhile.

Last week was our first "Couples Coaching" session. It was a lot of fun! It was great to have candid conversations with people from all areas of life. Since it was the first one it was mostly a meet and greet dinner. We knew 4 of the 6 couples. We are to think about family origins and how that affects our marriage for this Thursday. We will fill you in on what this means more after Thursday.

Also this last weekend Conni went on a women's retreat with our church, Oh Be Joyful. There were 19 ladies who stayed up at a house on the mountain. She said it was a great time but also very emotional. She was reminded how broken this world is and how important it is to show everyone love. They studied a Beth Moore study called "Loving Well." She (Beth Moore) talked about loving the "joy" (easy people to love) "testy"(those people who are constantly testing you) "foe" (enemies or those we hate) and "far" (strangers) and how we can love everyone in every situation through God.

Tomorrow John is going to hang out with the young guys in the community and build relationships via playing xbox. Conni is going to help out with the girls bible study. We are both very excited to get involved with helping out with the youth ministries here.

We have found out that there is a lot of spiritual oppression here and many dark practices remain in Crested Butte. In fact, at the store that Conni is working at the owner held a "smudging" which is burning incense to get the "bad spirits" out while "praying" and chanting and then lighting a different incense to bring in all the "good spirits". She opted not to attend. Many of the people here are very lost, hurting and want nothing of what we have. So all we can do is just love on them but really, what else can you do?

Pictures!

Up on the mountain they had TONS of ice sculptures! They were so cool! The next few pictures is from our trip to Ouray (ice climbing capital). The last picture is Mt. Crested Butte.