8 Months in Short

It's been a long time since we last wrote. Here's a breakdown of where we've been at...

December...

• Christmas Eve we invited anyone who wanted to join us to attend a nearby church's Christmas Eve pageant and service. We hosted a dessert reception at our home afterwards.
• Our Tampa Palms Seed Group changed nights for the month of December, from Saturdays to Thursdays. We wanted to see if this change would allow others to attend who had other obligations on the weekend. After a month of trying this on for size, we decided to keep meeting on Saturday evenings.
• We prayed and prayed that we would be allowed to introduce someone to Christ before the end of 2007--and at our final meeting of the year, on December 26, 2007, the Lord answered our prayer!

January...

• We went "home" to Jersey and shared a wonderful time of fellowship with family and old friends.
• We traveled to San Antonio, Texas, for the RCA's "ONE THING" conference. It was a really sweet time of rest and renewal as we were poured into by dear friends from seminary and challenged by amazing speakers. We got back to Tampa ready to "hit the ground running"!
• We arrived home from San Antonio to a flooded apartment. 400 gallons of water came down through our ceiling (in our absence) and the majority of our material possessions were ruined. We were thankful to have renter's insurance, but had to stay temporarily in a hotel and then sort through mildewed things and decide which to move and which to trash.

February...

• We moved into a "new" apartment one hallway over from our old one. We had a lot of work to do with moving/sorting/working with the insurance company, etc. The flood really wiped us out for almost an entire month.
• We began the process of making our home ready to host people again. The second week after the flood, we again had church in our home, albeit there was almost no furniture! For a month we held worship in an empty place; people were really gracious, and we were able to use the large "space" for some interesting fellowship activities--we even had a paper airplane fight one night!

March...

• Life finally returned to normal. Steve continued to meet with USF students, alternating between a weekly discussion of the Bible and a "walk out your faith" in which students were challenged to live out what they were studying. They handed out candy to strangers, dined "On Top of the Palms" to experience upper room fellowship and prayed for each other.
• Easter! We hosted our first "Celebration" on Easter Sunday. FRC, a sister church on the other side of Tampa, was kind enough to host us for a combined service. It was a wonderful time of sharing together what God has been doing in our midst.

April...

• Our second baptism! Dr. Sergei Paromchick was baptized in Tarpon Springs in the Gulf of Mexico on April 19. Sergei became a Christian while joining the "family" of the Tampa Palms Seed Group, and God is already starting to do cool things through him!