• Daughter.  I still can’t believe I’m going to have a daughter!  “Daughter.”  The word just suddenly sounds awkward in my mouth, yet it makes my heart jump with excitement.  A day is coming soon when I’ll answer questions about my family not just by saying “my wife,” but “my wife and daughter.”  In that day I’ll regularly go down that aisle in Walmart that glows pink.  I’ll find myself buying dresses and little pink toys and coloring books.  And I’ll be on a first-name basis with all the Disney princesses.  I can’t wait!
• Dad.  That word to me has always meant my dad.  It’ll be so weird to have someone calling me that!  My dad did a pretty good job of defining the concept for me.  If I can imitate a lot of what he did, I should do alright.
• Dr. Pepper.  This is the best drink ever.  My consumption these days is mostly limited to the diet variety because I’m quickly becoming an old fat guy.  By the way, the Diet Dr. Pepper people did a brilliant job of spreading the rumor that Diet Dr. Pepper tastes just like regular Dr. Pepper.  What a lie.  But for some reason a lot of people actually believe it.  All you have to do is taste them both and the whole thing is quickly revealed as a marketing sham.  But it’s still better than drinking tea or something dainty like that.
• Doo wop.  This is good stuff.  Whenever I think of oldies, especially 1950s, doo wop is what comes to mind.  The beat, the harmonies, the melodies–I love the stuff.
• Dylan.  Every kid has a weird uncle.  I thought that my younger brother Dylan would be Laura Marie’s weird uncle.  Then I realized that all four of her uncles are weird… most of them are really, really weird… like Dylan, for example.  But he’s a pretty cool guy.  And it only took three decades of my influence to make him that way.
• Dog.  There’s one in the hallway right now.  Not sure what’s up with that.  But that’s okay, because dogs are awesome.  A lot of ‘em are, anyway.
• Drums.  When I first started playing the drums at church exactly a year ago, it was terrifying.  I would actually tremble with nervousness as the worship service started.  But now I have so much fun playing them that when I’m not behind the set, I ache to be banging on the kit!  We’re blessed with a great group of music folks at CrossWay, and it’s a lot of fun to play God songs with them.
• Daniel.  I’ve been studying the book of Daniel, in the Old Testament of the Bible, for over a year now.  It is so fascinating!  One of the really cool things about the Bible is that you can read it literally countless times and always see something new.  I’m just now beginning the verse-by-verse part of the study, and it’s already blowing me away.

The class was from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., and there were seven other couples there.  Well, one young lady was with her sister and another was with her mom, while the rest were with their husbands.  It was pretty interesting!

We learned about how the baby is developing and what changes are taking place in Carolyn (translated: we saw pictures of how her guts are getting all squished up).  We learned what will happen when it’s time for the baby to arrive.  I’d always wondered just what exactly it meant for a woman having contractions to be “dilated”–now I know a little more than I actually wanted to.

A nurse came in and talked about child safety, then gave a quick crash course on infant CPR.  It made us nervous to hear about all the creative ways that kids find to get hurt, but it also helped us feel a little more confident to be aware of some of these schemes.

Then we learned some relaxation exercises to use during labor.  I just hope we can remember this stuff!  The giant bouncy ball things were amazingly comfortable.  I think I might have to get one to use for an office chair.

One of the best parts was the last hour when we went over to the hospital (PRMC) and actually toured the maternity ward.  Our instructor, Diana (who was really good, by the way), showed us where we’ll come in the hospital, which elevator to take, and exactly where to go.  We went to the labor & delivery room and she showed us some of the equipment that the doctors will use.  It’s very comforting to have seen that room, because it’s helpful to fight anxiety when we don’t have to imagine what the place might look like.  She showed us the waiting room where family and friends can go, then showed us how to navigate the maze to the parking lot where we’ll all go to take our newborns home.  Oh yes–she also showed us where the operating room is where they do C-sections, and the NICU area, but of course we didn’t go in there.

It was cool getting to meet some other people in our same situation–it’s a first baby for everyone, and all the women are due right around the same time.  One of the moms-to-be is carrying twins!  It’s also neat that the other couples probably live nearby, since everyone signed up for a Berlin class instead of a Salisbury class.  We may have some future Training Station children inside the wombs in that class!

Diana gave us some helpful materials to take with us until next week.  She even gave us homework!  Of course, that homework is watching some videos online, and that’s my kind of homework.

When we hear the word “holiness,” it might bring to mind some stuffy guys with their neckties too tight, who look down on everyone else for not being as good as them.  Actually, that has nothing to do with holiness.  True holiness can be summed up as living to please God.  When we live to please God, we do things that make Him happy and don’t do things that make Him unhappy.  It’s really as simple as that.

Watch for the podcast to be up soon!

• I will be intentional about getting to know people outside the church.
• I will be intentional about getting to know people within the church.
• I will share my life with other people and will invest in them.
• I will participate in a community group.
• My family and I will spend time with other families.
• I will invite people to participate in my community group.
• I will pray for deepening friendships with other people.

Some highlights:

• One little girl had a band-aid on her finger and after about an hour she came up to me complaining that her finger hurt.  When I looked, I saw that she had wrapped her band-aid as tight as a tourniquet.  Her finger looked like a balloon that was squeezed in the middle and her fingertip was dark purple.  I quickly ripped off the band-aid and her finger returned to normal.  Once the panic had passed, it was pretty funny!
• Every year when I visit her class, Carolyn’s students try to figure out just what our relationship is.  It’s almost always the girls.  Some think Carolyn is my mom or sister or daughter, others think she’s my girlfriend.  One little girl, after I said Carolyn’s my wife, said quizzically: “She’s your life?”  When I first told the girls that Carolyn and I are married, one of them said, “Eeewww!”  Another one said, “You’re nasty!”
• The day before the field trip, Carolyn had explained to her class that she was having a baby.  The next day, one little girl asked me, “Can Mrs. Hyde have a baby soon?”  Another one asked her if she was having the baby tomorrow.  Carolyn’s expecting this will probably go on all year long.
• These kids just don’t get the idea of a scavenger hunt.  We had a list of objects to find, and every time I read the next item on the list, the kids would pick up whatever they saw next.  For example, I said, “We need to find something beautiful.”  One girl picked up a dead, jagged, broken branch, held it up to me, smiled proudly, and boasted, “This is beautiful!”
• One of the park employees played a game with the kids to teach them about habitats and survival.  At one point she asked them, “If you were a deer, what would you need to survive?”  One little guy piped up: “A gun and a bow and arrow!”
• It was time for recess when we got back to the school.  Several kids were drawing in the dirt with sticks, so I tried to teach them how to play tic tac toe.  We played a couple games, then I walked away to a different part of the playground.  Several minutes later one of the kids came over and asked me to walk back to where they were drawing in the dirt.  This little girl had scratched a cross in the dirt–her two lines made up her version of a tic tac toe board.  Around the cross were some X’s and O’s.  Two little girls were squatting there.  They looked at their game, then up at me, then back at their game, then back at me.  Finally one of the girls asked me: “Who won?”

So we’ve been waiting anxiously for the Famous Dave’s in Salisbury to open.  It finally opened last Monday, and yesterday afternoon we went there for the first time.  It was about 2:30 in the afternoon, and there was still a wait!  The place has been packed all weekend.

Unfortunately my allergies were raging so it was difficult to just relax and enjoy the experience–but the food was so good that it was well worth it.  This time Carolyn got a BBQ pulled pork sandwich with this apple-cinnamon stuff.  I got a BBQ chicken sandwich with this macaroni and cheese that has corn and jalapenos mixed in with it.  It was all so good!  And they’ve got five or six different bottles of BBQ sauce on the table, so you can drown your food.  My mouth is totally watering right now just thinking about it.

We got dessert to go because I wasn’t doing well.  It doesn’t work that great to get a hot praline sundae to go, but it still rocked.

I can’t wait to go back!

• My grandmother describing how she met my grandfather–and how she had the hots for him.  It’s kind of a weird thing to read about–I mean, we’re talking about my grandparents–but fascinating all the same.
• My dad was born on Christmas, and my grandmother writes about how she went into labor during a Christmas Eve program, but waited until after it was over before she told anyone she was about to give birth.
• The various accounts of the ministries where my grandmother served in her church, and how God answered some of her big prayers.
• Historical tidbits from a bygone era, things like riding in a wagon, churning butter, buying a first refrigerator/ washing machine/ car, moving into a log house built in the early 1800s, what it was like to live during the Depression and World War II, hurriedly getting married after Pearl Harbor was attacked and my grandfather enlisted, etc.
• The story of my Uncle Hugh when he was a toddler; he told his mom he was going to work (she didn’t believe him), then he hopped on his tricycle and actually pedaled downtown to where his dad worked.
• Their chicken named Cleopatra, who came to their doorstep every morning and laid an egg, then made a bunch of noise to let everyone know she’d made her daily delivery.  She died one morning after laying a freak egg–it was an egg inside an egg, and it was so big it killed her.
• The adventures of my Uncle Randy in church when he was barely old enough to talk.  On one occasion the preacher was getting fired up and looked at my grandfather.  Randy thought he was yelling at his dad, so he pointed at the preacher and yelled, “Shubup!”  Another time there was a guy praying in the worship service and his prayer kept going on and on, so the toddler Randy settled the matter by abruptly shouting, “Amen!”
• One of my favorites: In the early 1950s, my grandparents placed an ad in the newspaper to sell their house.  A drunk guy saw the ad and went to the wrong address–he was so hammered that he went to the house next door and said he’d pay them whatever they wanted for the house.  The surprised couple actually sold it to him!  My grandmother jokingly told them they owed her for the ad.

I am absolutely convinced that the value of leaving a journal for later generations cannot be overstated!

We looked at several basic truths:

• God gives us Scripture for personal transformation.
• We must receive Scripture as the Word of God.
• We must let Scripture work in us.
• The Word of God changes us.
• The Word of God helps us endure suffering.

That’s a very concise summary, but if you want to know more, you can check out the podcast.  I’ve gotten behind in uploading them, but I’m planning to get the whole series to this point uploaded this week.