On the plus side...

Our Stake has become ginormous. Our ward split again today, for the millionth time since I've lived here. When my family first moved to The Wooodlands in 1987, it was population 22,000, and there was just the Woodlands ward. We were in the Houston North Stake. Now The Woodlands has grown to somewhere near 90,000 people and there are seven wards in this area. That is a lot of Mormons. It's always bittersweet when the wards split. The first time it happened my friends and I were stunned and upset. How could they split us up like this?? We recognized it had to be done, but we didn't want to miss seeing each other so often. We vowed that we would attend every ward, every week so we could all see each other. There were three wards then, and lemme tell you going from nine to five every Sunday lasted less than a month. That's when we realized that somehow life would still go on and we'd still all see each other at other activities... And that nine hours of church is a LOT of church. The sweet part of splitting the wards was that my friends made friends with other friends and those friends became friends too. Well, more like friendly acquaintances but still, it made the friend circle bigger and that is usually good thing. It also put some people into my ward that I ended up being best friends with, and we're still best friends to this day (wait, maybe we weren't in the same ward but whatever, it worked out).

So I will look at this ward splitting as a wonderful blessing-the gospel is growing and we'll be able to add to the friend circle again, and ... um we still have the 8:30 church slot in the same building. Suckers! Some people have to drive to Timbucktu to get to church... and speaking of Tim Buck Tew, that's what we're naming our first kid. Boy, girl, cat.. whatever.