Weekend Wrap-up and Sunday Snippets

Hope you all had a fabulous weekend!  Don't the weekends go by way too fast?

Friday I went to a great new restaurant/bar in Raleigh called Chow. It was great! I meant to take a picture of the food to show you guys, but I didn’t remember until the end.

I had the Piedmont Burger which was a burger with melted pimento cheese and a fried green tomato (YUM!) and sweet potato fries (YUM!) and a Mother Earth Weeping Willow Whit beer (from Kinston, NC). It was sooo good!  In fact the best part about Chow was all the local brew choices. My friend got the Hummingbird (from Whitsett, NC) and it was delicious too!

We ate at the bar and watched the Carolina game.  The bartenders were freaking hot!  I will call them Hottie and Youngin.  Hottie had an amazing body and his t-shirt and jeans skimmed every inch of his body just right.  And he had a deep voice with a southern accent which I am a sucker for.  But my favorite was Youngin.  He had these big beautiful blue eyes, great hair and an easy-going demeanor.  He kind of looked like Zac Effron.

 
Saturday I went for a walk/run with my friend and our dogs. Cam overdid it. It was hot out and I think he got overheated and his pads got messed up too. He was about to die. He threw up in the car on the way home and was limping around like an old man all weekend. I took him to the vet today and she trimmed a broken flap off his pad. He also has gained 8 lbs. over the last month!! So he is on a diet now as well.

Sunday I went to church. Here are my notes from the sermon (listen to the whole thing here):

Basically the main message was that if you really understand the Gospel and who Jesus is you cannot have a lukewarm reaction. You will either love him or hate him. He walked us through some of the reasons why people hated Jesus back in the day:

1. Jesus included people of other ethnicities. (this one he related to our church and said the vision is for our church was to be multi-cultural but if you look around our church we are still really “white”. Yes, he went there. And he explained that in order for us to be multi-cultural we will not always do things exactly the way you think we should. We will try new music, new things, new styles. And he pretty much told us we need to stop being such “tightie whities.” Calling out racism in church…that was pretty bold I thought.)
2. Jesus kingdom includes people with dark pasts and present struggles.
3. Jesus’ movement was not a political movement. He said we are not political people, we are Gospel preaching people.
4. Jesus would not immediately right all wrongs or end all suffering. I loved this quote on that subject: “Are we searching for Him for HIM or for what He can do for us?”
5. Jesus focused on heart change, not external obedience.

We are getting ready to launch a new campus at church and I am going to volunteer for the First Impressions team for that campus. Luckily a friend from my Bible study group is going to rotate Sundays with me because committing to every Sunday is just too much right now. We are doing practice runs the next few Sundays and I got to meet some good people (including the super down-to-earth new pastor’s wife) so I am feeling good about this.

Also…drum roll please….no cigarettes in almost 2 weeks! Some days were really hard. I was irritable, anxious, depressed and it was all I could think about for a while, but the last 3 days haven’t been that bad. Only 5 weeks left to go in Lent. But I am thinking now it might not be as hard to just give them up for good.