Another week already

I've tried.  Multiple times.  To sit down and blog this week.  No such luck.  This week was crazy.  And exhausting.  Unproductive in many ways, yet productive in very different ways.

Leah had to sit with Bart during part of the service

Sunday was the start of the exhaustion.  Our team went to a church to be part of the service.  That meant getting on a bus at 7:30 for the hour plus ride.  We were there super early and just hung out until the service was ready.  Something about church services in Venezuela, they're long.  I think it lasted 2.5 hours.  And then we had lunch with the church staff.

They LOVED the fact that they had assigned seats at lunch

After that, some of the staff from the church took us to a monastery, which is a local tourist attraction.  It was fun to get to tour the grounds and speak with one of the monks.  He took us around and spoke really good English, considering he's German and hadn't spoken English in years.  The team thought it would be a lot of fun to have a silent retreat there since they book rooms for people to stay.  It was a little too quiet for our kids' liking though!  We were home sometime around 5:30.

Bart and Tony at the monastery

That was the busiest day of the week for sure.  The rest of the week consisted of team meetings, conflict resolution meetings, helping plan spring break, one-on-one times, working on our annual student conference and the usual school stuff.  Surprisingly we did great this week with school.  I'm not sure how that happened, but it did.  I'm grateful.

The view from the monastery

Classes were cancelled Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week, which ended up being a huge blessing with everything going on this week.  Things in the country seem to be getting tense with a lot of protests.  At this point, it hasn't been crazy here, but in other cities it seems like things are getting out of hand.  Some of the guys on the team (and I was not even remotely supportive of this) marched in a peaceful protest on Wednesday.

At this point, we're just really enjoying the weekend and the down time.  We're pretty emotionally and physically exhausted.  Hopefully this coming week will be a little more calm.

Tony having a time of confession 

Noah, as priest, taking in Tony's confession.
"Don't worry, I got this."