fall is coming!

fall means more in my mind than cooler weather and falling leaves and back to school.
pretty much my whole summer is spent preparing for fall...and christmas.

this week marks the start of a new piano teaching schedule. no more full days of teaching!!! while it was great for scheduling, it was way too much mentally for me to do up to 11 lessons in one day! next summer i will probably re-evaluate how i do my scheduling. but this week it is back to afternoons! and praise God i have almost filled my schedule to capacity. i have 20 students taking lessons this fall! He is so faithful in how He provides for me.

i am re-vamping the way i do piano. not necessarily teaching differently, but doing a few extra engaging things to help kids stay motivated to work hard. it's amazing what a little incentive can do :) still have to finish some minor details for that before tuesday afternoon, but the big picture is all set!

we also will begin introducing some new songs at church over the month of september. we decided to refrain from introducing anything new over the summer months and to take that time to solidify our repertoire. we've carefully selected a few new songs that will begin to show up over the next few weeks and i am so excited to share them with our congregation. i hope they love them as much as i do and that God will use them to minister to them like they have ministered to me. here's one of them :)



and then there's choir. and christmas. two big undertakings for which i am constantly begging God to keep me humble and to work greatly. these projects are so much bigger than me. i look back at last year - a year of a lot of firsts - and i can see God's hand through every meeting and every rehearsal and every plan. i just pray that i don't become too confident that i don't feel the need to turn to Him. feelings of stress and insecurity and being overwhelmed are definitely not my favorite, however i know that if i'm NOT feeling them, i'm relying too much on my own know-how which is a recipe for disaster. it's so good to know that i'm truly not in this alone.

also - in preparation for fall, i've purchased 2 new scarves.
just in case you were wondering :)