I get up before everyone else to shower and dress before waking the girls in our hotel room on Sunday mornings.  Bobby comes from his room an hour later, bringing Justis with him to put a dressed-for-church Grace into her wheelchair and take her to breakfast. Hope is ready for church when Bobby comes and she and Faith go to breakfast also and they help Justis get his food.  I'm left in the room alone for 30 minutes to finish getting ready and get luggage by the door so Bobby can pick it up later.  This morning Bobby finished feeding Grace and brought a luggage cart up before I left the room and told me how he silenced the breakfast room below a few moments earlier.

In the wake of the Supreme Courts' ruling for gay marriage, all of the news shows were left with nothing to talk about but...gay marriage.  The children in the breakfast room, including my own watched the TV as it flashed pictures and videos of same-sex weddings and same-sex kisses over and over.  Finally my husband had had enough.  Standing to his feet he said, "Would someone PLEASE change the channel?!  I don't want my kids watching this."  The room fell silent as the breakfast cook quickly changed the channel to Sesame Street.  With no applause or "amens," Bobby spoke again with, "...and thanks for the support!" and left the room.  

It took guts for Bobby to do what he did and I applauded him afterward.  I was proud of him for speaking up and putting his foot down for the sake of the children.  

Bobby posted this event on Facebook and was reading the comments he received while on our way to Ebenezer Church of the Nazarene outside of Crowley, Louisiana when he pulled our van and trailer into a church driveway, parked, grabbed some gear and started walking toward the church, only then  reading the church sign: Ebenezer United Methodist Church!

To the gentleman silently watching all of the action from the front door of the church, he said, "How you doin?  I'm at the wrong church!"  The silent observer said nothing and we drove away laughing.

Our drive to Hammond Sunday afternoon was intense as we sat high atop the Mississippi River bridge in Baton Rouge waiting for traffic to move.




Bobby called his contact at New Beginnings Christian Church to say we were running late.  We never did see what caused the jam when we finally got rolling again.  However, we had to keep our speed down because of the torrential downpours.

We had just driven out of the storm but it was catching up to us when we got to Hammond and stopped at the church with only 10 minutes to spare.  There were some men outside with umbrellas waiting on us to help carry equipment inside.  Bobby and Landis had the stage set up in 10 minutes and a couple of women met me with kitchen dish towels for drying off and led me to a bathroom with a hair dryer and a tall can of hair spray.  Someone else parked our van and trailer after we unloaded Grace.  We had a full room of people waiting on us patiently and we had a fun evening of music, food, and fellowship.

Okay, so it took an eventful day like this one to break my 19-month silence on The Bowen Arrows.  After Bobby went to the wrong church I knew I had to share our laughs, but the last laugh was on all of us at the end of the day.  We said goodbye to the precious folks at New Beginnings and drove a mile before Faith said from the back seat, "Hey, where's Justis?"  Suddenly, the peace and quiet we'd been enjoying in the van for the last 2 minutes made sense.  We had left our noisy kid behind!  I told Bobby not to be too hard on Justis because he'd been hanging with a really cute 7th grade girl and was helping her and several other kids move folding chairs. Turning around on a dead end street we were back at the church a couple of minutes later to pick up our once-was-lost but now-he's-found baby.