Sunday morning we roused the children bright and early at 5:00 am so we could all scrub most of the ranch off ourselves and get to town for 7am Mass.\u00a0 St. John’s Catholic church is awaiting a new priest, and during the transition they are sharing a priest with another community, hence the early hour.\u00a0 Still, the Mass was well attended and the message on the gospel passage, Matthew 18:15-20, was excellent and thought provoking.\u00a0 Interestingly, both the outgoing priest, and the interim priest, are African missionaries to the U.S.\u00a0 I believe we will see more and more of this, and God bless them for their willingness to serve the Church here in a foreign country where there is a shortage of priests.<\/p>\n
Finishing so early in the morning meant we had lots and lots of time to enjoy our last day at the ranch.\u00a0 We took a little drive on the ranch roads (past some cows, of course) to see where the road goes through Carrizo wash, and had been flooded from all the recent rainfall.\u00a0 The wash has it’s own peculiar beauty at various seasons, and I always love to capture some of that, from the cracks in the flooded earth, to the plant life, to the marbelized sand art created by rushing water, to the etched sand cliffs along the banks.\u00a0 My darling husband so lovingly offered to crouch down low and get a shot that I couldn’t quite reach, and wound up slipping backwards into the muck.\u00a0 He wryly handed me the camera (which he had thankfully saved from a fate close to death) to commemorate the moment.\u00a0 His gun was not so lucky…<\/p>\n
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