I Want to Change the World!

Tonight, as I rushed out of COR’s sanctuary at the conclusion of Leadership Institute, I found myself having a familiar conversation with God … I want to change the world! That conversation was reawakened in me at a Chris Tomlin concert last year in State College. Well, since it’s late and we have to get … Read more

Leadership Institute Has Begun

Yesterday, we spent nearly 12 hours getting from Clearfield, PA to our destination in the greater Kansas City area. While our two flights were short (45 minutes to Dulles, then 2 hours to Kansas City), we had a long 4 hour layover in DC. After our State College District group rented 2 large SUVs, we … Read more

Leadership Institute, Here We Come

A few months ago, we wrote about attending Leadership Institute, a 2-day conference hosted by The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection (COR). Well, the has come for this event. Tomorrow, we travel to Kansas City (we’ll return Saturday). We’re excited about attending this event with a group of pastors from four districts in our … Read more

Gated Community

For the first couple of months in our new home, we used boxes to block the staircases, to keep Ethan from climbing them. It was a bit of a hassle, but it worked, usually. We now have gates installed that work well — at least until Ethan figures out how to open them! 🙂

Do You Know How to Feed Yourself?

Watching Ethan grow is teaching us a lot about human development. One significant area is watching Ethan learn to feed himself. Ethan has made a lot of progress in the seven months he’s been with us, but he also has a long way to go. These days, Ethan can be trusted to feed himself with … Read more

Life Realignment :: Tank-Filling Activities

One final piece to the “life realignment” series is tank-filling activities. Tank-filling activities, as you can probably guess, are activities that “fill your tank.” 🙂 The idea for this comes from a lesson Wayne Cordeiro, senior pastor of New Hope Christian Center in Hawaii, taught at the 2006 Willow Creek Leadership Summit (see this page … Read more

Central Conference Pension Initiative

We’ve listed several causes that are important to us, causes that we support financially (either occasionally, annually, or monthly). One of the recent additions to our list is the Central Conference Pension Initiative (of The United Methodist Church), which according to the website … is a long-term solution that provides retirement financial security for dedicated … Read more

Life Realignment :: Rest

Our day off is a good time to think about rest. This post is part of a series on Life Realignment — a series about finding our new rhythm, which we’re finding necessary since bringing Ethan home and moving to new ministries, all in recent months. (If you missed the previous posts, they’re here: Nutrition … Read more

“Adoptive Families” Magazine

We subscribe to Adoptive Families magazine. It’s a great resource for, well, adoptive families. This week, our blog was added to their list of adoption-related blogs. Scroll down to “Asia” under “International Adoption Blogs” to see the listing of our blog. Check out other blogs listed there, too. (We’ve added this link to our blogroll … Read more

Life Realignment :: Exercise

I am working my way through a series of posts called Life Realignment (see also Routines). It’s a series of thoughts about finding our new rhythm, which is necessary since bringing Ethan home and moving to new ministries in recent months. So far, I’ve written about Nutrition. Now, I want to write about exercise. Joleen … Read more