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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Our Christmas Letter

If anyone's interested, here is our family Christmas letter for 2014.


GREETINGS FOR XMAS:


We’re so glad to be in the Gettysburg, Onida and Agar area.  We love living here and hope we get to stay a long time.  We are very blessed to have such wonderful people to live with and to serve God with.


We are building an addition to the Gettysburg church.  We have had fundraisers such as concerts, silient auctions, dinners, pie auctions etc. It wouldn’t be possible without the wonderful donations of the fundraisers and people from the church.  The community helped with a couple of the fundraisers, too.  We still have a ways to go, but we’re confident that we’ll get there.


Youth programs are going good in Onida and Gettysburg.  We’ve been praying for God to help us reach the unchurched children of the parish, and it’s working!  We have around 15 to 21 kids in both churches.  We have church school after school on Wednesday afternoon in Gettysburg.  They call themselves the Faith Builders.  Jeff helps with the music.  The Onida church school still meets on Sunday mornings.  We also have eight kids in confirmation class and ten or so in the senior high youth group.


Jeff has been doing the public address announcing for football and cross country.  He loves it.  He is also in bowling on Monday afternoons.  Wanda still love ceramics on Monday afternoons, visitations and activities within the church.  We do shut in notes, inspiration notes etc. Circles and bible studies keep us busy too.  Jeff is working this evening as we were gone a few days to a wedding in November then stayed an extra day.  


Jeff loves sport activities and a lot of kids from his conformation and Faith Builders are in them.


Both Sully Buttes (Onida-Agar-Blunt) and Potter County (Gettysburg-Hoven) did well in sports this fall.  Each of them made the football playoffs, playing each other in the first round.  Potter County won, but then lost in the second round.  Each of them won their district in volleyball, so they again played each other in the regional tournament.  This time Sully Buttes won, going on to the state tournament where they finished fourth. etc this year.  Marileen Tilberg from the Onida church made us purple and red shirts (purple for Sully Buttes, red for Potter County) with half of each team’s nickname on them.  We love wearing those shirts when the two play against each other.


We visit both sides of the family in Blunt and Armour as often as we can.  It is always fun to do that.  We don’t get to see either our parents or the rest of our family nearly as much as we’d like to, but it is always wonderful to see them when we can.


Jeff is in Rotary in Gettysburg and the Wheatland Lions in Onida, and Wanda goes to the senior center once a week to eat and then play pick two with friends.


We celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary this year.  It sure doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but the calendar doesn’t lie.  On the actual day, we went out to Oahe Manor to celebrate with our friends there.  That was about all we did that day (in fact, Jeff had a football game to announce that night), but we took an extra day or two over Thanksgiving to spend in Sioux Falls, and we also had a weekend in Pierre earlier in the year, so we considered those our twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.


Wanda has been busy making calendars for shut ins, friends, our Gettysburg, Onida and Agar congregations, and others.  This is just one of the many craft projects she works on throughout the year.  She loves to make things and give them away to people.  She also loves to write poems, especially for people who’ve lost loved ones.  With all the visits she does and all the things she gives to people, Jeff says it’s like she’s his associate pastor.


We feel incredibly blessed to have the life we do, and we are even more blessed to have wonderful people to share that life with.  We have friends in Pierre, in Wessington Springs, in North Sioux City, in Agar, in Onida, and in Gettysburg.  And of course, people we’ve gotten to know in other places along the way.  Our lives have truly been an incredible journey so far, and we know God has more blessings to come for us.  We are very glad you are a part of our lives, and we hope you will be for many, many years to come.


Have a wonderful Christmas and a blessed New Year.  Best wishes always.


Wanda & Jeff Adel














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