DeeperStill Oklahoma City from Rich Kalonick on Vimeo.

It’s time to announce the winner of our Fabulous K Giveaway. Woo hoo! The winner will receive a custom blog design as described on our previous post. Excuse me one moment while I do some fancy schmancy number generating on random.org. Here we have it…

736, you are our winner! Please excuse me one more time while I figure out just who Siesta #736 is. Ok, got it!

Kayte Elliott – Wake Forest, NC

My favorite color combo is blue and silver…although I also love the Red/Green combo because I love the tradition of it.
December 4, 2009 10:17 PM

Congratulations, Kayte! Email us at [email protected] and we will get you all set up. We can’t wait to see your fabulous new design!

Before I go, I thought I’d share some pictures from our snow day. The Lord did indeed bless us with a day filled with flurries! It was so fun. None of it stuck to the ground at our house but it was beautiful coming down.

Siestas, guess whose Friday weather forecast includes snow? Houston’s! Of all places! It probably won’t stick, but won’t that be fun for us? We got an afternoon of flurries last year and Jackson had the best time playing outside with the kids on our street while all the moms documented the rare occasion with their video cameras. We’ll all look like fools tomorrow but we’ll be happy fools!

Do y’all like our blog’s new Christmas design? Kelly at Fabulous K Creative whipped that up for us so we’d have something festive for the season. She has been wonderful to work with on our last two designs. Besides being creative and excellent at what she does, Kelly is generous! She has offered to give away a free custom blog design to one of our Siestas!

The giveaway is for a “Lovely Design Package” ($70 value) which includes:
-a custom designed header
-matching wallpaper sides
-color coordination of links
-name signature for bottom of posts
-(up to 7) custom sidebar titles
*Please note that Fabulous K only works with blogs hosted on Blogger.

To enter the Fabulous K Giveaway, just leave a comment on this post with your name and hometown. And for fun, let me know your favorite Christmas color combination. (Mine is red, green and silver.) I will close comments, do the drawing and announce the winner this Saturday night.

Kelly is also doing a huge 12 Days of Christmas giveaway on her blog. I told you she’s generous! You can enter that giveaway through the weekend.

*Comments are now closed*

I have wonderful news. Maryam and Marzieh have been released from prison in Iran. Praise the Lord!

You can read about their release here and here.

They may still have to face a court hearing, so please pray that their release will be unconditional. Also pray for the restoration of their health, their protection, and that God will continue to strengthen their faith.

Psalm 98

Sing to the LORD a new song,
for he has done marvelous things;
his right hand and his holy arm
have worked salvation for him.
The LORD has made his salvation known
and revealed his righteousness to the nations.
He has remembered his love
and his faithfulness to the house of Israel;
all the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.
Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth,
burst into jubilant song with music;
make music to the LORD with the harp,
with the harp and the sound of singing,
with trumpets and the blast of the ram’s horn—
shout for joy before the LORD, the King.
Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it.
Let the rivers clap their hands,
Let the mountains sing together for joy;
let them sing before the LORD,
for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
and the peoples with equity.

Is there something you’ve always dreamed of doing? I’ve always wanted to do two things. Well, if I thought hard enough about it I could probably name a hundred things, but we’ll stick with two. First, when I was a kid I used to dream about galloping across a golf course on a horse. Don’t ask me why! Second, I’ve always wanted to work in a bookstore.

In college I was sort of an unofficial Beth Moore book supplier to a lot of the Christian girls on my campus. Our resource director, Diane, would hook me up with the books that had been requested and then I’d get them to my friends or friends-of-friends. The only problem was that since they were my mom’s books, I had the hardest time letting the girls pay for them. Diane probably had to mark most of them down as donations, which I’m sure she was pleased to do, but the point is I was a terrible book seller!

Even so, the dream of working in a bookstore has lived on in my heart. Every time I drive past a LifeWay store, I imagine myself working there. I think it would be so cool!

Well, this semester I’ve been getting to work at our resource table at Bible study with Diane, Evangeline, and several other co-workers and volunteers. It’s kind of been a scaled-down version of my dream and I’ve loved it! It’s been really fun to stand behind the tables and help our ladies with questions they have about the products. (But it’s so hard for me to take their payment. I’m still compelled to say, “Oh, don’t worry about it!”)

Tonight is the last session of our Revelation study. It’s been an amazing semester and I can’t wait to see how the Lord will wrap it all up for us. Some of you have asked if this series will be made available and I wanted to let you know that it will! Praise the Lord!

The Revelation DVD Set – Here and Now, There and Then – will be available after the New Year. We’ve actually been taking pre-orders for it on our web site for the last month. The product will begin shipping the first week of January and it will go out in the sequence in which we received the orders. If you’re interested in doing this 11-week series, you can see a video clip and pre-order it here. There is an accompanying listening guide that includes some brief weekly assignments. (Not full-scale homework like many of our other studies.) If you have any questions, you can email our resource department through the contact page.

As usual, I didn’t ask my mom if I could tell this on the blog because she’s generally averse to product promotion. But I wanted all of our siestas who wished they could be with us every Tuesday night to know that this is going to be available. At least if Mom gets mad and wants to fire me, I can now put book sales on my resume. Maybe a LifeWay store would take me!

Good morning, Siestas! How is everyone today? Well, ever since the time change my kids have been waking up at about 6 a.m. That is definitely not when I would prefer to start my day, but with the extra time I’ve been trying to get out of the house and jog a little bit. I’m NOT a runner by any means, but this baby weight has got to go! So I’m trying. If nothing else, I’ve enjoyed getting to talk to God without morning cartoon background music or needing to stop and wipe someone’s nose or worse. Was that TMI? I’ll go ahead and change the subject now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Marlon Alexander, who is one of the children we sponsor through Compassion. He just turned twelve a few days ago. Every time Compassion sends out a group of bloggers, all the posts give me this overwhelming desire to get on a plane and head to Honduras to see him. By the way, have any of you ever been to Honduras? Did you know that Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has one of the scariest runways in the world? Curtis and I have survived it a few times. I feel like we should get a t-shirt or something.

Compassion has a team of bloggers in El Salvador this week. You can go here to read about what they’re doing. I know they would appreciate our prayers. While it’s fresh on our minds, this is a great time for us to log in to Compassion’s web site and send an email or even a Christmas gift to our sponsored children. I was never good at writing until I realized I could email. I love that! I hope you all have a wonderful Wednesday, ladies. We love you here at LPM.

Living Proof Live – Springfield IL from Rich Kalonick on Vimeo.

This was the last Living Proof Live event of 2009. Thank You for a great year, Lord! And thank you, Rich, for giving us a glimpse of each event through these recap vidoes. We appreciate you so much!

Siesta Video Message from LPV on Vimeo.

Hi Siestas! This post is going to have information for you about a block of hotel rooms at a special group rate, hotel room scholarships that we are giving out, and a few other tidbits. We will also use the comments in this post to allow you to connect with each other regarding the event, especially those of you who are traveling solo.

Special Hotel Rate

We were able to confirm a block of rooms at an Omni Hotel for our Siestas so that you will have the option of staying together. The Lord came through for us in a big way because initially they were not able to accommodate us. Praise Him! This is a nice, newly renovated hotel just 2 miles from the church and they have given us a reasonable rate. Here’s the information you need if you’d like to reserve a room there.

Omni Houston Hotel
Four Riverway
Houston, Texas 77056
Phone: (713) 871-8181
1-800-THE-OMNI
Tell them you want to book a room with the Siesta SMT Celebration for the night of Friday, January 22, 2010.
The room rate is $80.

*This is NOT the Omni Westside. That would put you much farther from the church and you wouldn’t get our special rate.

Hotel Scholarships

By God’s grace, LPM is able to scholarship 100 Siestas in 50 double rooms at The Omni for our Scripture Memory Celebration. We are thrilled to be able to do this!

-We will cover your stay for Friday night, January 22.
-You will share a room with another siesta in which there will be two double beds.
-If this will allow you to attend the conference, please email [email protected]. She is going to give scholarships to the first 100 women who email her.

Jenn and I are both part-time LPM employees with small children, so it may take us a couple of days to answer all the emails. Thanks for your patience!

Things to Do

If you’re staying the whole weekend and will have time to play, here’s a great web site to help you plan. You can even request a visitors guide.

www.visithoustontexas.com

What About our Husbands?

We have been asked if men can attend the Siesta SMT Celebration. This is going to be a very intimate group and we want our ladies to feel the freedom to worship and study with just the girls. We love our Miestas, but we would like to keep this event for women only. Thank you so much for understanding.

Connecting with Others

We know many of you are traveling solo and are hoping to connect with a travel buddy or even someone to split rental car and hotel costs. We want to open up comments in this post to allow you to do that. Just make sure you provide a way for others to contact you.

We hope this information will be helpful as you plan for our big weekend. We can’t wait, Siestas!