June 20th Weekend

Saturday.
Work as usual. Nothing horrible happened, it was almost weird having the truck come in at a normal time. I was able to leave about an hour early, which was nice because I was pretty exhausted from the week. Something really awesome came up Saturday night. I was in my room and Nam came back. He told me he was at another dorm and had found a Bible and started reading it. He asked if I had one that he could read because he wanted to keep reading! Needless to say I was pretty excited about that one. I pulled out my Bible and was showing it to him. Niah was in the room as well and he looked really excited and curious as well. At dinner on Sunday I asked Nam what he knew about Christianity and he told me that his mom is a Christian in that she goes to church. Otherwise, they don't read the Bible or anything so I guess he doesn't know much.
Sunday.
I didn't sleep well that night, but I woke up at 6 and decided that I wanted to try trail running. Some of you may remember a certain hill on our way to the Bighorns that a certain group of teens thought they could run to the top of... It was kinda like that. I tried running to the top of Observation point, and I was doing fine until I got to the hill part. I only had to stop 3 times going up, it was pretty killer on the legs. Otherwise, I think I'm in pretty good shape right now. Our first two services went well. This week we were at the Madison campground and we had 16 people show up for our morning service. Amber preached a great sermon on God the Father for Father's day. It was her first time speaking/preaching and she did a great job. In between services we had almost 2 hours. So we walked around the area for a little bit and chased ground squirrels into their holes. We had about 8 people for our second service.
After the services, we went back to Old Faithful and had lunch. Then I went out with Nam and Toong to West Yellowstone. I missed the turn at first so it was almost an hour longer trip than it should have been. But we still had plenty of time. We walked around for a bit and found an amazing clothing store with ridiculously low prices. I bought a jacket that I'm pretty excited about for $26. We had a pretty good time. On our way back we are told that the road to Old Faithful is loaded down with traffic because of an accident. An SUV broadsided an RV and we had seen the ambulances rush through. The front of the SUV was smashed in to the windshield, the RV had it's tires blown and right side torn up a bit, it was pretty bad. Unfortunately this was right in between Old Faithful and Madison. We got back in time for me to eat dinner and run back to my room and get ready for our last service. I picked up Staci and Sarah, Amber was going to meet us at Madison. And there was the crash still. Rangers were alternating traffic through a pulloff, but the line from Old Faithful was at least a mile long, probably more. It was actually a lot of fun waiting to get through, we laughed a lot. But we got to the campground at 7:30, service started at 7. So that one didn't go through unfortunately, we all felt really bad that Amber was the only one there, we couldn't call her because of cell phone reception. We pretty much got to the campground, turned around and headed back. Of course, the crash was clear now and we got back in good time. We got to attend the service put on by Rod and Linda. Rod has some pretty good messages. He preached about the "lunatic" who was the first called missionary - the story of the possessed man and the herd of pigs. Not who you would expect at all. It was a very good sermon. After that we met as a group for our debriefing. I'll be preaching next week and I think I'm actually looking forward to this one. I think I already know what I'm going to preach about.
Monday.
I've been looking forward to this day for a while now. Whitewater rafting!! Amber, Staci and I met at 9 and drove down to Grant village, less than 20 miles south of Old Faithful, I think. There we met up with the rest of the ACMNP group that we were going with. We hopped in the van and drove down through the Tetons... that place still gets my heart racing every time I see it. We got to Jackson Hole and paid for our trip. Got into our wetsuits (AWESOME) and loaded onto their shuttle bus. About 30 minutes later we got to our rafting area on the Snake river. I had been told they were class 4-5 rapids, but I think our guide said more like 2-4. The water was freezing but we had sunshine the whole time. Our rafting guide, Ben, was amazing. A really really funny guy with a lot of stories to tell. The Snake river had been at it's highest this year since 1997 and it was still pretty high, which I think lessened the rapids a little. But we still got plenty wet. No one fell over, several of us jumped in though. I paddled for about half and sat in the front for a little while - the major splash zone. I definitely would go again if I got the chance! That lasted about 2 hours. We were picked up by the shuttle at the end and drove back to Jackson Hole. We went to a Mexican restaurant called The Merry Piglets. I thought the name sounded more like a bar than a Mexican restaurant... The food was pretty good. We loaded up the cars/vans and headed back. We got back to Old Faithful about 9pm, and I was surprised how tired I was. I think I was asleep by midnight. It was a great weekend, and now I get to go back to work!