What's Up at WillowBridge?

 

It's the second Wednesday of the month which means...I'm reporting in on some of the highlights and happenings of life here at WillowBridge over the last month! 

* In the land of major mile markers, one of our tenants received her driving permit since we last talked, and she is SO EXCITED. She worked and studied hard for her test and we were so stinkin' proud of her when she passed!

* Driver's Ed Teacher Ryan is still working with the other tenant, who is hoping to pass her test soon! I like it when class is in session because then I get to hang out with the baby!

* Also since my last recap...WillowBridge turned ONE! I blogged about it already, but I'll throw in a couple of pictures here. We had a little party in honor of ONE YEAR of serving tenants!

* November 1 was Orphan Sunday, and the WillowBridge/LARC team represented Gateway Woods at one of the churches in Grabill. We were able to share during both services and we had a booth in the entry area. It was a good way to make connections with people here locally!

* Because we had some extra warm days in the first part of November, we took full advantage of getting the building all ready for winter! And OH how pretty she has looked here in this late fall sun. We did the last mowing and lawn treatment - and we cleaned up all the dead plants from summer, put away the porch furniture, and covered the fire pit. We did leave out the pumpkins and mums for just a few more days. Might as well get all the life from them that we can! 

* Tim, Justine, Ryan, and I worked to plan things for Thanksgiving and Christmas for the tenants. We're excited to enjoy a holiday season here with all of them! (And Grabill has some fun things planned, too, so we're looking forward to that.) 

* We've been working hard on office work, too, trying to make better processes and organize as much as we can. We've been thinking through things that just don't work as well as we'd like and figuring out how to make them better. 

* So excited that a couple of you sent in encouragement notes to our tenants! Those were so much fun to deliver! Thank you SO MUCH!

* Oh! And we're doing an "attitude of gratitude" challenge throughout the month of November, studying parts of Scripture that talk about thanking God - and then actually doing something to thank God for the blessings He has given. We're sharing that on the WillowBridge Instagram and Facebook pages, and it's been fun to see people taking a look and trying them for themselves, too!

How can you pray?

* Will you pray for our one tenant who is still working to pass her permit test? She has been studying and trying so hard, and she just wants to pass! 

* We'd also love your prayers as we continue through the process of bringing in additional tenants. It's a slow process (made slower by pandemic delays) but it's moving along. We are praying for wisdom and direction as we work through it!

* We are also praying that we can give our current tenants a meaningful holiday season. We are excited about the things we have planned for them and hope they prove to provide great memories!

Thanks for all the great emails and questions I get about WillowBridge...it's always exciting to share our work with you! We appreciate you supporting us with your kind words and prayers!

An Update on Miss Abby

Happy Tuesday!!!

Miss Abby the RV has been going through quite the transformation in the past few days, so I thought you might like a peek!

First of all, we have a name update for you. My friend Amber, whose incredible artistic talents I've shared with you before, is making an art piece for us to hang inside Abby. We decided that we will always call our home-on-wheels the "Shafferland Shuttle." It's a nod, of course, to our weekly post The Shafferland Shuffle. Currently, our shuttle is named Abby. If, years down the road, we change to a different RV, we'll name it, too, but they'll all be in the fleet of Shafferland Shuttles. So somehow she's going to work that into her art, though we still have to figure out how it all works. 

So in our Shafferland Shuttle named Abby, here are the most recent updates!

The last time I devoted a post to our work on Abby, we had just completed demo day! You can read in that link all the things we did that day, but let's just say at the end of it, she was pretty sad and empty looking.

Ryan carefully labeled all the cabinet doors and drawers and pulled them out for painting. This is a task we can do whenever we have time - and we borrowed a corner of the storage room in the basement to use for our workshop. On some of the colder days over the last couple of weeks, he's worked on priming and painting them, and they look so sharp!

But then Indiana was blessed with about a week of GORGEOUS fall weather. We're talking t-shirts and sunglasses all the way. So we put aside the indoor painting project in favor of painting the pieces that we couldn't remove from the RV. 

We started by priming all the cabinets, and that took a couple of days. There are a lot of cabinets!

And then we got to move to regular painting. Priming is always so discouraging, because no matter how slow and careful we are, it always looks like a 2 year old painted it. Regular paint is so much more fulfilling. 

We were able to accomplish the bulk of that on our weekend, and it was such a blessing. The weather was perfect, we were able to put in long hours out there together, and it was so much fun! 

Then for the last couple of days, Ryan used his down-time to work out there again - this time painting the walls. We are painting them sort of a beachy blue. Loved how they turned out!

We decided to paint the refrigerator/freezer and one small panel with black chalkboard paint so we can write love notes and grocery lists and other such fun. :) 

Because of Ryan's hard work, we were able to knock out all the painting inside the RV before the cold weather arrives - which is supposed to be tomorrow, I believe. Thanks, Ryan, for working so diligently! Here are some peeks at Abby in her current state:

We love how she's shaping up!! Of course there is still much to do, but she's looking pretty! We can't wait to see how she turns out when she's all done! 

Ten Years Ago...

Today's post deserves so much more photographic fanfare than I am able to provide. But please allow the words of my heart to overcome what my photography lacks.

Ten years ago I published my first book. Can you believe it has been ten whole years? I know some of you were reading all the way back then and you remember when the Advent book was born!

Ten years ago, I loved pictures as much as I do now, but I didn't know about staging and styling for things like books. I knew about capturing screen shots of the cover, which I did, but all the little cute Instagram-worthy photos were lost to me. (I wasn't even on Instagram then anyway. Did it even exist ten years ago? I don't know.) 

Ten years ago, I was muddling through the loss of love while trying to celebrate a dream-come-true, and it was the most awkward kind of mess that I didn't always handle well. But in the middle of the hurt, this little book-baby of mine was a beautiful gift and was the one shining joy of that year. 

I still remember my first glimpse of the book in its physical form. I was at the lake with friends and knew there was a chance my author copy had been delivered to my house. So I called my friend Ronda to see if she could check at the house before coming to the lake for the weekend, and when she walked in the door, she had the box in her hands! I squealed with so much delight and posed for my picture - lake hair and all.

I still remember coming home from work on a good, old-fashioned sweltering summer day and finding the box of books piled on my back porch. My first order - ready to ship to friends and family who placed orders with me!

I still remember the first time I got to talk about the book publicly - at my church! They interviewed me about it at the end of the service and then had an all-church lunch and book signing! 

If the girl in that picture looks familiar to you (besides me, I mean) it's because about two years later, she was a bridesmaid in our wedding! 

I still remember when my little town of Greentown hosted a book signing for me at the local library.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure those kids are in junior high and high school now. How is this possible? (Their parents were friends of mine from college.)

I still remember when my Marion church had a book signing for me during their annual Thanksgiving dinner!

And Indiana Wesleyan's bookstore had a signing there, too!

And there was a small interview on the radio that led to big things...

So even though this is the only "cute book" picture I have for you:

...the memories of a decade ago are rich in the experiences I had. 

(I would have taken some purposefully styled pictures, but alas, I have not yet been reunited with my Christmas decor.)

This little book has become a tradition for some. They've told me they read it every year during their family devotions. Others are reading it for the first time. And whether people read it once or often, I'm always grateful for the privilege of sharing my words with them. 

This book was born out of a Christmas season when I struggled to feel the joy. God met me in a tender way and helped me see portions of Scripture in ways I hadn't before, and I wrote about what I learned. 

If you haven't had a chance to read it yet and would like to, you can order it online here - and you should still have plenty of time to get it (even with all the shipping delays that surround us these days) before December 1. (I forgot to add, until Becky commented, that the company I published through doesn't print a backlog of books to sit in a warehouse. So if you go to Amazon and see it is out of stock, you can still order and they will fill the order.) 

If you're around the Fort Wayne area, I do have some copies in my possession once again and would be happy to talk with you about getting one to you!

I'm so happy my little book baby hits double digits this year. I'm so thankful for the blessing it was in my life a decade ago. I'm so thankful for the kind words people have shared with me about it! 

Happy Birthday, His Advent! 

The Shafferland Shuffle

 

This has been a long week! I had to look back at my pictures to see what I was even doing a week ago! Now I know why I blocked it out: our week started with SNOW!!! What in the world? I am not ready yet! Well, weather aside, here's a peek at our week.

* Last Sunday morning, after THOROUGHLY enjoying our extra hour of sleep, we worked a booth at a church to share about what we do and offer opportunities for people to volunteer. We spoke briefly in both services, and it was a good morning! BONUS! I got to see one of my friends from my station days, and that made my entire day. After church, Justine came over and she and I spent the afternoon working on computer stuff while actual snow swirled outside. WHAT!?!? And then I apparently fell asleep in the middle of a project and Ryan so kindly documented it for me!

* Monday was our 95th monthiversary! We were on duty together all day, which made working on a monthiversary fun! My parents and aunt came to visit in the afternoon, and they took us to Dairy Sweet; they needed lunch, but we had already eaten. So.....we got ice cream that turned out to be WAY bigger servings than we imagined. (I didn't hate it.) I already told you all about the monthiversary in greater detail, so I'll just leave the day at that!

* Tuesday was a gorgeous fall day here - no more snow! I wrote some devos for WillowBridge during the day, and that evening, Ryan did driving test studying with one of our tenants. He is SUCH a good and patient teacher. While he did that, I hung out with the baby. Tough job, but someone has to do it, right? Anyway, about studying for driving, we are relearning all the official names of all the signs that I don't think we've actually known since we took driver's ed ourselves.

* Wednesday afternoon we had a long training session on Zoom, and when that was over, we went on a gorgeous sunset walk. (Sunsets are so early now that we have to take them in the afternoon.) We had some more meetings with Tim and Justine that evening, and then our work day ended, and it became the beginning of our WEEKEND!! 

* Our weekend this week was all about Abby. Thursday was priming day. Priming for hours! We did take walking breaks between coats - and here's a story for you about that! We saw a woman playing with her kids in their driveway on our first walk, and then about four hours later, we saw her out on a walk of her own. She stopped, looked at us, and said, "Have you guys been walking all day?" LOL! And then we proceeded to make a new friend in her! Working together, we were able to get ALL the priming done that day.

* So then Friday became painting day for REAL! We turned on piano hymns for the whole day  and painted all the cabinet frames white. We were so happy with how it turned out. So much lighter and brighter than it had been! We went grocery shopping that night, which also included dinner out at Subway. I don't think I've ever been happier about a flatbread sandwich!

* We went back to work yesterday, which included running our tenants several places and catching up on a lot of computer work after being off for two days. In his down time, Ryan worked on painting the walls in Abby! (She's going to have blue walls.) I made two delicious meals yesterday - Dashing Dish for the win TWICE. And look how pretty WillowBridge looks in the fall. Those red bushes are amazing! 

The Saturday Six

 

One.

I know some of you may not be ready to think about Christmas decorating yet, but I will say I have noticed a surprising increase in the number of people putting up trees - even before Halloween! (If only mine were here with me, I would be joining them.) But whether you're already working on it or saving it for later, here are some ideas of what to do with leftover stray decor. 

Two.

A few days ago I shared with you some of our favorite investments from 2020, and then I happened upon this post with a recommendation for a very pretty and affordable cookware set! We purchased Calphalon pans with wedding money almost 8 years ago now, and a few of them are starting to get a little ragged looking. (We cook A LOT.) So this caught my eye, even though we aren't in need of a full set replacement just yet. But if you are - I think this one is a great contender! 

Three.

I haven't tried this recipe, and normally I don't share them if I haven't tried them. BUT! It looks really delicious. Maybe I just miss sweets and carbs - I'm not sure. But if you're looking for a little extra something for your Thanksgiving or Christmas appetizer table, this might be a sweet option! 

Four.

I checked to see if Katie Farrell had her 2020 recipe roundup out yet for Dashing Dish Thanksgiving recipes. She didn't yet - but I looked back over this one from 2019 and thought it was a great list! If you're planning now for Thanksgiving Day, these are some healthy options for you. Even though I don't actually like Thanksgiving food, this list made me want to plan our day!

Five.

Ryan, this one is for you. (And for all you other adventure-lovers out there. I'll sit this one out, thanks.) Apparently Indiana has a ziplining roller coaster??? 

Six.

We shall begin AND end this week's list with Christmas talk. If you're not only into decorating, but also into sporting Christmas tees, here are some cute ones that aren't overly complicated in design!