This will be a big year for New Beginnings Christian Church.  Woop-woop!

Our church currently meets in a school gymnasium every Sunday morning.

We don’t own our own building yet, so we rent from a small private school.

That means…

Unloading giant container-carts full of supplies

setting up those supplies

setting up chairs in perfectly-placed lines

Putting together power-point screens and projectors

Running cables to and from instruments and sound equipment

and many other things

… every Sunday morning.

and then, of course, packing it all back up nicely to fit back in those container-carts, which are then placed strategically back into a trailer truck, which is then hauled away to be stored in a super secret location until the the following Sunday.

“woops, you can’t find your keys now? You think they might have been in the ‘welcome center’ container? Too bad, that’s the first one that’s loaded into the trailer…you’ll see ‘em in a week!”

Anyway, I digress…

This is a big year for us because we are finally moving forward with building our own building!! We currently own approximately 15 acres in the sort-of-boonies, about 5 minutes from the border between Virginia and North Carolina.

The property was, and still sort-of is, zoned for farming. The first structure we built on had to be called a ‘pole barn’ instead of a pavilion, just to meet zoning rules.

 

Lemme just say, we love our Pole Barn.

We’ll use any excuse to hold worship on the property under the pole barn.

Unfortunately, during really hot or cold months we aren’t able to.

We will hopefully break ground in the next couple of months and then be able to worship in a building with walls!

All this to say….

here’s what we did last weekend: a little bit of grunt work to get things prepped for the Easter service on the land.

Also, Baxter tagged along to get some runnin’ around time.

We also used this opportunity to do some doggy socializing.

Our friends brought their dog, Casey, who is a Cairn Terrier.

In our minds: Terrier + Terrier = brotherly love.

Not true! Why didn’t you guys warn me?

After circling them around one another and ‘moving in slowly’ it seemed like all was going well, when suddenly…there was an ‘attack’.

Lemme just say…there was an immense amount of barking and gnashing of teeth.

It sounded like wolves fighting over the last elk left on the tundra!

When the event is re-capped by everyone else, they tell me that all of the screaming was actually coming from me! I don’t recall that part of it.

In my memory of that moment, all I saw was sharp pointy teeth and I heard the yelping of my little pup, Baxter!

Baxter didn’t even seem scathed by the ‘attack’ (as I’ve taken to calling it these past few days).

I guess in my naiveté I though “all dogs get along”… just like “all dogs go to heaven” .

Stop licking your chops Casey… you don’t get Baxter as a snack today!!!

 Also… it was really windy that day.

We sought refuge out of the wind to enjoy our Nathan’s dogs in the truck.

And there was also a really pretty bird… who very dumbly made a nest in the middle of the field (where the lawn mowers and tractors roam freely)!

This momma bird is very lucky someone spotted her nest before this patch of grass was mowed. The eggs are SO beautifully speckled and camouflaged.

Happy hatching little fellas!