Your favorite Christmas movie is………?

Click the title of this post to be taken to the audio player below. You must listen to this quick mp3 and I guarantee it will put you in the Christmas Spirit. Listen ALL the way through. It only gets better as it progresses, and the ending note is amazing. It almost brought tears to my eyes.

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In other news (and something to read as your song is playing)…A lot of us are getting winter weather! Right now in Dallas it is 72 but is supposed to drop to the 30s in the next hour or so! We are under a Winter Storm Warning for 1/4″ ice AND 1-2″ of snow tomorrow. I love work, and I can work from home…but snow days just rock!

Enjoying the song?

::Edit::

Just in the last hour hour and fifteen minutes, it has dropped 20 30 degrees!

So it now day 8 of 42 on Wellbutrin. Today was my first dose of 300mg versus the 150mg I was taking last week. The first few days I felt really tired and spacey on it (and it’s a stimulant, so I should have been more awake!) and kind of dizzy, but nothing too bad. I am waiting for the appetite-suppressant effect to kick in…

Maybe it was the double dose but today was the first day I noticed a huge difference in the way I felt. At the risk of sounding corny, I actually felt … SUNNY … today. It was weird, but that was the only word that popped in my mind all day. Side effects have changed a little bit…the stimulant part is kicking in as I was seriously CRACKED OUT several times today. It was like I had 10 shots of espresso or something (and I don’t drink coffee much anymore so that’s a huge thing) – I was really hyper and weird, but a  least Chris found it to be entertaining. It would come and go in waves of spastic-crazy-psycho-lady to normal-I-keep-going-to-bed-really-late feelings. A few headaches that come and go, but really nothing too extreme.

So that’s the story so far. How are YOU doing today?

over the holiday, i read two great books – the starbucks experience: 5 principles for turning ordinary into extraordinary and you don’t need a title to be a leader: how anyone, anywhere, can make a positive difference.
in the leader book, one of the phrases that has stuck with me is “obligation or opportunity.” so many things in our routine, day-to-day tasks we often deem as obligation: returning emails, answering the phone, responding to messages, interruptions by colleagues…the list could go on forever. one of the ways we can lead (to positively influence) in our lives is by changing our perspective on those mundane things.

instead of looking at them as obligations, try viewing them as opportunities to positively influence someone. next time your phone rings when you’re in the middle of something, think about going above and beyond what that person is going to ask of you. blow them away with your kindness.

obligation? or opportunity. you can decide, regardless of your title or position in your career or your life.

i wonder this. so many churches, big and small, all over our country (and in my traveling experience, yes, just our country…perhaps our canadian neighbors? i dont know…) seem to shove food down our hungry little throats.

i understand there is personal responsibility, and aside from that, are we feeding our culture’s hungry consumeristic monster as well as the people who walk in the doors of our church? 

let’s think about it.  in the churches i have visited in the last four years, we either give away or sell the following:

• donuts
• candy (available at childrens/youth services)
• sodas
• lattes, mochas, smoothies
• orange juice (the bad, concentrated kind)
• bear claws
• pizza, pizza, pizza
• more soda
• more candy
• more coffee

this isn’t about whether or not church can make you fat.  but are we (generally speaking) setting an example on how we should care for our bodies and/or spend our money by making these things so readily available?

we say sacrifice your latte and help pay for our building yet we sell you a four dollar latte. we say don’t sleep around and exercise and get sleep but we’ll stuff you full of krispy kreme.  we say teach your kids the importance of a dollar, don’t spoil them, yet we give them $2 before their children’s program so they can buy a soda and a nerds rope and some reeses?

i say this of course after eating far too many christmas cookies and drinking two cups of peppermint hot cocoa…

what do you think?

surprisingly, the ol’ kc is quite mild for this time of year.  we arrived last night with no problems (sans the typical gas station food) and enjoyed the culinary delights of both the wilson and jackson families. 

at this time i would like to say hello to my 82 year old grandfather-in-law who i discovered today reads my blog, when he asked my why i hadn’t updated flowerdust in a couple of days.

chris and i went down to the country club plaza for the 77th annual lighting of over 80 miles of christmas lights.  it was so warm, i didn’t even need a jacket.  we took a spot on the top floor of a parking garage and enjoyed the ill-timed switch on along with synchronized fireworks.

tomorrow night is girls’ night with four of my old gal-pals.  not sure yet what kind of trouble we are going to get into, but i’m sure between the five of us, something mischevious will be going down tomorrow night…

happy turkey day!

in a couple hours, we leave for kansas city. chris’ family lives on the MO side, but we’ll be going in between both KS and MO most of the weekend. i hope you have a happy thanksgiving!  we’ll be back late sunday night.

Hi, I’m Anne. And I’m officially on an anti-depressant. I work at a great church, I am married to the most incredibly patient and loving man, I have some great friends, and I suffer from mild bouts of depression. There. It’s said.

I popped my pill right before eating breakfast this morning. One down, 41 to go. I marked the days on my calendar (perhaps being a wee overdramatic?) and realized that my last day of meds is January 1. Appropriately so. A new year, and hopefully new chemical levels that my body will enjoy.

Thanks for your encouraging words and emails and prayers. I’ve gotten a few emails from people who have been thinking about getting some kind of anti-depressant, so occasionally (maybe weekly), I will post the good, bad and ugly of how Wellbutrin XL is effecting me.

The biggest way depression has effected me in the last couple of years is I have lost my motivation. I used to be extremely movtivated, would love to hang out with friends late into the night, was spontaneous, and lived for the freedoms the weekend brought. Now when my mind isn’t kept busy, I tend to enjoy just being alone – all the time – and feel really sad. And worthless. Sometimes I’d think Chris would be better off not being married to me. Pretty much a selfish pity party I wouldn’t mind wallowing in, but could control when I needed to.

Looking forward to seeing how this will change…

he knows my addiction to christmasy warm fuzzies. i am out of my office for a few moments this morning and return to the following items:

1. A Santa Baby Christmas CD from Starbucks
2. A grande non-fat, decaf Peppermint Mocha with whip and sprinkles

And that is why my husband rocks. Well, one of the many, many reasons!

if jesus tried to get a job in the american church today, he’d have a heckuva time unless he graduated magna cum laude from some institute of higher education and paid his dues to the local seminary. and some of the disciples? completely uneducated and unpolished. good luck there.

chris and i had coffee at texas roast on wednesday evening with a new friend we’ve met. he’s going to be planting a church down in austin in the next few years. anyway, we were talking about church health and two factors to a healthy church: obedience/listening to the direction of the spirit and cultural relevance (not exclusive from each other). but with all of our combined church experience it was really easy to see the churches who are having the most health issues (leadership/staff issues, money problems, not fulfilling the great commission) were the churches who had flip-flopped those priorities…trying to be cutting edge and relevant FIRST while, although a close second, submission to our biblical callings was placed after that.

maybe it is a process all churches must learn and grow through. maybe not. i would love to sit and talk for hours with pastors of churches all over on why they spend more money on paint than missions or why their job descriptions sound more like managers of a GAP while they leave out things like passion, calling, holiness, accountability and replace them with networking, stamina to work long hours, and degrees. then they wonder why budgets fall short, ministries grow numerically but not spiritually, and burn out is at an all time high. when church staff turnover is the same rate as retail turnover, something must be amiss.