House hunting

LaRissa and I spent yesterday morning looking at some houses in Anna. Looks like there are some really good possibilities. Just continue to pray for the sale of our house in Sherman and for us to find the perfect home for our family in Anna.

San Antonio

LaRissa and I are in San Antonio this weekend at the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention's Church Planters' Retreat. The sessions start today at 11.

LaRissa and I had a great time last night. We ate at one of our all-time favorite restaurants, The Melting Pot. Awesome and totally romantic. We were a little bummed when we got back to the hotel, however. We planned to use the hotel's "high-speed internet" to download some back episodes of "Lost" and get caught up, but the internet was more like "molasses-speed internet" and we couldn't ever get the episodes to load.

It's great to get away with my totally hot wife. We needed some time of recharging and refreshment.

Update on a Meeting Place

Looks like we will definitely have a place to meet, I'm just not sure where yet. I've located three different possibilities that look promising. Continue to pray for this, however.

Meetings with Anna City Manager and Police Chief went really well last week. I hope connecting with these guys will really help us to build relationships and make connections with our target communities.

A Couple of New Links

Check out Kerry Mackey's ministry at Street to the Seat. Good stuff on assimilating new people into the life of the church.

Some of you might remember a guy named Lance Witt. He has a new ministry called Replenish. Looks interesting.

Arrrrrgh!

I posted this at Walk the Trail, but I wanted to really ask you to pray for us. I feel like Satan is really attacking us through sickness right now. Preparing our house for moving is tough enough on the kids. They are wrestling with moving away from their friends, the only school they have ever gone to, and the church they have been a part of for the past seven years, so being sick just seems to compound things. LaRissa and I also are just exhausted because we don't get much sleep when the kids are sick. Please be in intense prayer for us. Pray for God to deliver us from Satan's attacks and to restore us all to health.

I am feeling a bit like Charlie Brown right now.

My wife informs me that someone has been sick at our house since September. There are six of us, and when one of us gets something, it just seems to make its rounds. I can't remember all of the sickness, but I do know that I came down with some sort of respiratory infection the week before Christmas, and I am pretty sure it turned into pneumonia. I broke a rib from coughing so hard. Not fun.

My oldest daughter, Grace, had pneumonia, and it took about three weeks for her to recover from that. Now, my middle daughter, Katie, has had a cough for about three weeks. This weekend, my son, James, ran fever and complained of a sore throat; and yesterday, the baby, Abby, started running a fever.

On top of all that, we are trying to get our house ready to put on the market. So, we are pretty exhausted right now. Be in prayer for the Kemp family.

Pray for a Place

We've hit a roadblock along the way in preparing for the church plant. We had anticipated using one of the schools in Anna as our meeting place. However, the school's policy about letting groups use their facilities for an extended time state that you must own property and have plans to move into a permanent meeting place within three months time.

That's a no on both of those for us. So, be really in prayer that God would either change some hearts in the school district so we would be able to meet there or that he would reveal to us the perfect place he has planned for us to meet.