This past week we spent a few days in New Orleans visiting our friends, the Tipton’s. We loaded up Thursday morning (1.5 hours later than planned since Will was up until 1 am the night before!) and made it to NOLA just in time for rush hour traffic. Fun!

We made it to their house and we loaded up and ate dinner at The Cheesecake Bistro – the food was good but the cheesecake was delicious. Bill and I (and Will) shared the cookies and cream cheesecake and it was so rich!

We had a great time while we were there! We didn’t do anything special but we went to the park, ate Raising Cane’s chicken, and had an “open house.” We also went to church Sunday before heading back to Nashville. Enjoy a few pictures of our time in NOLA.

David & Will catching up with all the latest news.

Real men aren’t afraid of kisses!

Or hugs!

And we can’t leave Anna Claire out.

Such a sweet face

David climbing up the slide at the park.

Will climbing through a tunnel.

On Friday night, the living room turned into wrestle mania!

This girl is brave…..

….. so is her brother……..

…… and so is Will.

We like to read books – here we are reading in our pj’s.

And here they are reading after getting dressed.

Party time! The boys loved the attention from all the girls

We also looked at a rental house while we were there. It had a pool – that would make the summer heat more bearable

We have spent the past few days in New Orleans! And today we have been catching up on our napping – at least Will and I have, Bill had to work (yuck!)

Tomorrow I will update with some fun pictures of the weekend. Thanks Tipton’s for having us as guests

This past weekend Bill and I went to the Passion Conference in Atlanta, GA. This is an event for college students and draws over 20,000 participants. We went with Matt Tipton and met a group of young adults from New Orleans. I was so excited about this event! It had speakers like Beth Moore, Francis Chan and John Piper just to name a few!

We had a great time at the conference and enjoyed every aspect of it. They had an area devoted to several social justice organizations and it was amazing how much money the students (their parents) donated during the course of the weekend. With a matching gift over 1 million dollars were raised to help the poor and oppressed all over the world.

We had the privilege to attend a break out session led by John Piper and the “topic” was reaching unreached people groups. But in general it was about reaching people for Christ who have not heard the truth or are hard to reach. One thing in particular really stuck out in the session to Bill and me.  It was the fact that Paul really longed to be in Rome but he was not able to be there because God had called him to do other work and that work was not yet finished. And that is exactly how we feel some day. We long to be in Chattanooga with our families or we long to be in New York City because we love it so much but we can’t do those things – yet. We must do what God has called us to do which is move to New Orleans. Maybe someday God will allow us to do these things that our hearts desire and long for. Paul did eventually get to go to Rome (of course it was as a prisoner – but still he went!)

One of my prayers recently has been that God would continually reenforce to me His calling for us to move. And the session with John Piper did just that. We also had a great time getting to know the New Orleans folks – it will be nice to know a few people when we get there!