Our Merry Little Southern Christmas

Well I hope each of you had yourself a Merry Little Christmas!

Tony and I sure did!

We kicked off our Christmas Weekend with seeing “A Christmas Story” at Cleveland Playhouse Square. I love the movie and now also love the play. You can see from the picture below my affinity for the bunny p.j.s!

We then packed our bags and headed down to Georgia to visit my folks and have a Southern Christmas! It was 78 degrees! So you better believe I put my sandals on as soon as I got down there. Unfortunately the socks, long johns, and boots had to come back on before hopping the plane back to Cleveland.

We got to hang out with my brother Ethan and his lovely wife Jamie and adorable daughter Abby. We hate that we live so far apart, but it makes the time we do get together all the sweeter! I must say my niece Abby stole my heart all over again as we hung out!

Great news-as of Thursday we got our 10 neighbors we needed to officially launch our NextDoor neighborhood. You may remember from my last blog NextDoor is most easily explained as a Facebook for your neighborhood. It’s a way to create more communication among you and your neighbors whether it be for a lost dog or recommendations for a plumber or even neighborhood safety.

Obviously this will be a great tool for Tony and I to use to both get to know our neighbors and invite them to events we sponsor. I really wasn’t sure how we were going to get people to sign up let alone get up to 10 people, but the Lord was gracious and we made it!

Please pray for our neighbors to continue to join so we can get to know more and more of them.

Also please pray for other believers to join us in our efforts to reach Old Brooklyn with the Gospel. We are hoping to start building a core team of believers to help us in our hopes of planting a church. And you just give us a jingle if you think you fit that bill-we'd love for you to join us! That is-if you think you can survive a Cleveland Winter:)

Having A Holly Jolly Christmas

What an exciting Christmas season it has been in the Loseto house already!

Tony and I got our first real Christmas tree this year. No no we didn’t go out to the middle of nowhere to chop it down ourselves. After all, we do live in Cleveland haha! We did the city folk thing and happily went to Lowe’s on Black Friday to find our tree.

However I do believe we still looked like rednecks as we stuffed our 6 foot tree into the back of my Camry haha! You can take the girl out of the south, but you can’t take the south out of the girl!

Tony and I also (with the help of our Missional Community from Gateway West) threw a Christmas Party for our block!

One chilly Saturday we went door to door with invites and Christmas tree cakes inviting everyone to our party. We weren’t too sure of the reception we would receive, but you have to start somewhere right?

We had about 8-10 people open their doors to us. Which is pretty good for Cleveland! We had some great conversations and laid the groundwork for some great relationships!

We were so excited that a handful of neighbors actually joined us for the party! This is the first type of planned outreach Tony and I have done in our neighborhood, and we were truly excited by the outcome the Lord blessed us with.

What was even cooler was that it didn’t stop with the party! We had another 3 neighbors stop by just to introduce themselves and bring us goodies either before or after the party! How cool!

Please pray for us as we continue to cultivate these relationships!

We are also starting a “Next Door” site for our neighborhood. Next Door is like a Facebook for your neighborhood-if you haven’t heard of it-you should totally look it up more info. It’s a way to share information in your neighborhood such as someone lost their dog, someone needs a good plumber, or someone has a table they need to get rid of.

What we hope to do is use this as a way to invite our neighbors to events in the future so we don’t have to annoy people by going door to door. Please pray that Next Door would spread like wildfire in our neighborhood so we’ll have more doors opened to us.

Thanks for your love and support friends!