KELLY is a ten-year-old 5th grader who began piano lessons and playing flute in band this year. She now has braces and is looking forward to finally having enough room for all her beautiful teeth.
CURTIS is in 7th grade and looking forward to turning 13 in January 2000. He has put the 21st Century Kids performance troupe aside in favor of involvement in church, school, and community theater. He was in the local children's theater's productions of Jack & the Beanstalk and Charlie & the Chocolate Factory AND had a feature role in our church's fall dinner theater.
SHONDA is now 16 and a Junior. Mommy & Daddy need to get more motivated to help her practice driving so she can drive herself to FCA and madrigal rehearsals and youth group. Some ideas about what-about-after-high-school are beginning to float around.
ANGEL, our 19-year-old college sophomore, has recently gone through some "okay, now what am I really doing here?" kind of wrestling. She's planning on a month in an inner-city Chicago elementary school in January, and will probably spend a semester next year at Cincinnati Bible College. [Editor's note from 2021: That Cincinnati semester never happened.]
DEBBIE is celebrating being cancer-free, one year after her double mastectomy. She had a follow-up/clean-up surgery in June (Happy 20th Anniversary!) and really is doing great. She spent 2 1/2 weeks in Austria in late June/early July housekeeping for the church leader training center there.
Having been out of the full-time ministry for a year, DEWEY has been bitten by the acting bug again. He had a paying gig at the Dakota County fair for 13 performances of a Chautauqua (look it up), and just finished playing a guy at the ages of 19, 29, 42, and 68 in our church's dinner theater...followed by a stint as Grandpa Joe in the same Charlie & the Chocolate Factory that Curtis was in.
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The months zoom by, the children grow up, and out lives are lived. We've grown to appreciate the little pockets of extra time with the family that Dewey's 3rd shift schedule affords, but still are open to whatever door God opens next. If there's anything that Christmas can teach us, it's that God's blessings can show up anywhere, anytime.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
