A Golden Bronze

Howdy friends! As many of you know I was in an Advocare weight loss competition called the Biggest Winner, for which I was hoping to win $500. Unfortunately I got third place, and only came away with a total of 13 pounds lost, which is great in itself, but I was wanting more. I did however come in first place out of all the guys that participated, hence the post title. So where do I go from here? Well Kristy and I are trying to work out fitting in the core Advocare products in our budget so that they can continue to catalyze our weight loss, but if not, it will have to boil down to eating healthy and working out. Not a problem though, since I actually like things like salad, broccoli, and spinach now :).

In other news I went on my church’s Men’s Retreat to 5Rock Ranch in Yamhill, OR over this last weekend. It’s a really beatiful woodsy place, and in addition to the great food there (which undid some of my 13 lost pounds :/) I came away with a lot of wisdom about being a Christian man. Being at place called 5Rock Ranch, the theme of the weekend was rocks, with topics like “The Foundational Rock” examining the question of “Am I enough?”, and “The Purposeful Rock” where we learned about, you guessed it, our purpose. All these talks gave me new insights and aspects of my own life to contemplate that I am so thankful for hearing. The weekend wasn’t only about being spiritually fed though, we also had some service projects to help the ranch. The team I was on installed a heat pump into one of the cabins where a mother and her eight children moved into after losing there house. This was really crucial because the ranch which took them in was getting government assistance for doing so, but would have lost it this month if there was no heating system installed, because the cabin would have been deemed uninhabitable. The downside though was that I felt like I wasn’t able to contribute much, not being so much the handy man, but the heat system got installed so I will be happy with that :). One more really awesome thing about the weekend was that the friendships that I have been forming in my Tuesday morning’s men’s group were further strengthened at the retreat; and these relationships are really helping OR to feel more and more like home.

One more item before I go is I wanted to plug two of the new websites I have designed for my freelance design biz. They are for two up and coming music artists names ChinaBlak and Ciara Corr. So check them out and I would be interested to know what you think.

Later.