Celebrate Christmas Together sneak peak!!

For the second year in a row, our church is sponsoring a free family-friendly event called Celebrate Christmas Together.  It is a wonderful event that includes things like train rides, an outdoor ice-skating rink, inflatables, snowball frenzy, crafts, musical performances, carolers, live nativity, storytelling and many other fun things to do and see, and all of it is free!    It really is a unique event and helps set the tone for a wonderful time of year as we celebrate the birth of Jesus.  If you are in the Louisville area, we strongly recommend you check it out! (the event runs nightly this week (Dec 10-14) from 5p – 9p and 5p – 10p on Friday).

As great as this event is, it is not something we imagined we would get to enjoy this year because of Lizzy’s ongoing treatments.  She is in the middle of back-to-back 5 day inpatient treatments (the most recent of which was supposed to start this past Friday but got postponed) and those treatments just wreak havoc with her blood counts and thus her immune system.  We have tried very hard to keep Lizzy away from any sort of crowd or situation where she would be exposed to a lot of germs.

To put this in perspective, since December of 2017, there have only been 3 months where Lizzy wasn’t in some sort of quarantine or isolation.  That’s 9 months of very little social interaction, no crowds, no big events, no hearing the roar of the crowd, or group laughter or applause or any of the other sights and sounds that come along with being in a crowd.  It’s just too risky and we can’t take that chance.

So, with that as a backdrop, once again God showered us with a blessing that is almost impossible to put into words.  Long story short, what started as a text message to my friend Steve turned into a night of fun, laughter and relaxation for our family.  We were able to play and act like kids (all of us!) and for 2 precious hours, not think about cancer, or chemo, or isolation, or transfusions or any of the 100’s of other things we’ve had to think about for the last year.  For just a brief moment, we could just be a family doing family things.  Laughing, teasing, jumping, smiling, listening, watching, hugging, enjoying and the list goes on and on.  I can’t even begin to say thank you enough to Steve and Rhonda and a whole host of volunteers who made this happen.  But if any of you all who were involved are reading this, please know that from the bottom of my heart, I give you the most sincere Thank You – Thank You for providing a priceless moment for my family at a time when our stress level was pretty high.  Thank you for sacrificing and going out of your way to accommodate us.  Thank you for loving the way Jesus loved.  And as Lori said in her FaceBook post – We Love Our Church!!

To give you a small glimpse of our fun evening, take a look at these photos:

Lizzy started a new 5 day admission Monday, so that just made this night even more of a special event.  We are so blessed.