This post is part of Positive Post Tuesday.

As promised, below I’ve provided many of the cool stories that have developed out of this “side vacation” we took down in South Carolina. All stories start with my blog and twitter posts; both of which proved to be an invaluable means of delivering up-to-date news on our situation. If you click here ,you can see how the evening looked through the eyes of my twitter feed. Pretty crazy stuff how fast it all happened – all of the posts are time-stamped.

From the blog/twitter, multiple things happened…

All of my twitter friends caught immediate wind of what was going on. As explained here, you can see that twitter sends immediate alert to everyone that is subscribed to the posts via phone, e-mail or RSS. Andrea had been giving me a hard time about my “twitter addiction” and how I updated it all the time. What she (or I for that matter) never thought of was how quickly this can turn into a prayer chain. Those that were following me sent quick notes of encouragement, which in turn were posted on their twitter feeds, which were read by others who follow them (but not me), who then sent me quick notes of encouragement and prayer, and on, and on, and on…. Pretty amazing.

Of course both our families were contacted as soon as we knew we were going to have this baby early. They then took the “old school” route and started calling other family members and friends, which includes the youth pastor at College Park church, who then let the entire youth group and volunteer staff know about it. Our pastor then was alerted and mentioned it during service so the entire church congregation knew about it.

I had contacted my boss on Saturday to let him know what was going on, but didn’t think to pass out my blog address. However, one of the members of our church used to work at AmerSpec with me. He ran into a current employee of AmerSpec and let her know about my website address, and she sent it to people at work. All of a sudden, my co-workers were leaving comments and notes of encouragement on the site.

Now, for those of you that don’t know me, I have a hard time ever being out of the office when I take time off. I’ve done a better job the past year at this, but I can’t help it - I love my job. This past week, however, was a different story. I HAD to focus on other things and not my job, so you could imagine the stress level that came with letting go for a week. I was blown away at how quickly people stepped in and helped out. Our Chief Marketing Officer met with all my underwriters to make sure things continued to move forward. Another individual stepped in and took over my work load, in addition to her own, to make sure our clients didn’t notice I was gone. My underwriters, who were already crazy busy, took on my role as salesman for the week. Every time I called in, no matter who I was talking to, the conversation ended with, “we’re taking care of everything for you.” Jennifer, the underwriter who works with me on the entertainment side, even had preemie clothes delivered to our house because she knew we wouldn’t have much time to shop for them. And to top it all off, the President of our company called me on Thursday to let me know that he would be sending his plane to pick my family up. Andrea and I were beside ourselves. It goes to show how people make a business great, and I truly work with some great people. I bet my work family could beat up your work family….

One of Andrea’s friends sent out an e-mail to all of her friends asking them to pray for us. One of those friends knew us from our days on the worship team at Huntington College. She let her husband know, who sent me an e-mail letting me know that his brother and sister-in-law live in Charleston and they would be more than willing to help. While we never ended up connecting with them, their e-mails and phone calls made the week much easier, knowing that there were people in the area there if we needed anything.

While all of this was going on, we continued to receive e-mails and comments on the blog from people we’ve never met before, letting us know they were thinking about us. How they got there, I do not know. Must likely it was from other people’s twitter comments or blog posts, like this one, from a new friend of mine, Greg Qualls, who is expecting his first baby real soon. We also received a word from another new friend, Brad Ruggles, that his two little girls had been praying for Asher each night and were always asking for updates (one of them, Chloe, even left a message for Asher here). It was truly amazing how the online blogging community showed up in a powerful way for us this week.

The biggest help of all has been my good friend, Andy. Andy is a radio show producer for a talk radio show. As a result, he can be pretty flexible with where he is working and how he takes care of things. Fortunately, he works for a great guy who was willing to let him work out of the office for a week to help us out. He stayed in a hotel, spending way too much money, in order to be our support and driver. I am not sure what Andrea and I would have done had he not been around. I also don’t know if I would have been able to put up with our constant mood swings, anxiety and sheer confusion for 1 day, let alone the 11 that he has. I am truly blessed to have such a great friend.

I know there are more stories that deserve to be told, but to be honest, I’m extremely tired and really looking forward to sleeping in my own bed. The adventure is not over by any means. We still have several weeks of visiting Asher in the hospital, but at least we can come home at the end of the day. Thanks to all of you who sent us notes, cards, flowers, planes and comments on the blog. As I type this, I see that we have nearly 70 comments for Asher’s baby book. I never imagined that kind of response and I look forward to the day Asher is old enough to understand how truly special his entrance was and the number of people that were thinking of him.

Quite an adventure, wouldn’t you say?