life connection connections

The Lovely Steph Leann and I do love our Sunday School Life Connection class at Valleydale Church (an sbc fellowship), as some of our favorite people are in there.  When the "Young Marrieds" started in 2005, we had only 6 or 7 couples--ourselves, The Hawbakers, The Barnetts, The Watkins, The Shaws, maybe one or two couples I can't think of, a couple named Frank and Amanda Hanson, and another couple who weren't married, but engaged to be so within a few months (I think they subsequently broke up, but that's neither here nor there--they, and the Hansons, didn't return after a few weeks).

None of us had kids, and the majority of the couples in the class now either weren't even married at the time (in fact, Willis & Meredith Watkins were getting married later that spring), weren't members of the church, weren't even residents of the state, or some or all three. 

From January of 2005, our class has exploded in size.  Yes, its been 7 years and alot can happen in 7 years, but we started out being taught by The Robinsons, then Jason & Emmy Turnbow--the class blew up in size a few years later, and ended up splitting because it was just to flippin' big.   The Lovely Steph Leann and I helped lead the charge into the great unknown of starting a new class out of the old class... and here we are.

Now, we are about 25 couples strong--and we are one of those lucky, blessed classes that at least 17 or 18 of those couples are really active.  And we have enough kids in this group now to supply an entire Chinese gymnastics squad.  And they are young enough too.

There is a three teacher rotation in our class at the time, which works pretty well... Big RyRy (Ryan Sherman), Tebershaw (Tebe Shaw) and winner of 2 BET Soul Choice Awards for his latest Moody Gazette Best Selling book "I Can't Even Walk (without you holding my hand)", JustFish, aka Justin Fisher.  So far?  Its worked out great... kinda like a Matthew-Mark-Luke thing, where you have three different personalities, three different styles and three different perspectives all on the same subject, this being the promotion and furthering of the Kingdom of Christ and its Scriptures. 

Why just spill this info, seemingly random?  Because I do a newsletter every week for our class called, funnily enough, The ShawFiSherman Times--and its become fairly popular at this point, full of important infomation, dates, events, birthdays and anniversaries, plus usually some thoughts on whatever at the end. 

And, because I'll probably start posting some of those, I didn't want to have to explain all of this stuff everytime I mention our Life Connection class and its workings... so there's the scoop.