The slightly longer answer is a little more technical.  We did an update to the software that keeps the blog and it didn’t finish the update correctly.  Plus, in an effort to save money we decided to move the blog to a new server.  Now, we are taking advantage of the “do-over” to change up the look and feel of the blog.  This is something we wanted to do a long time ago, but we’re seizing the day now.

So, stay tuned for the island paradise picture top right to change.  And also, expect my blog posts to get shorter.  I just noticed after importing that I get a bit… long-winded at times.

And shortly I’ll have a more amazing announcement for y’all.  The word has been trickling out, but I’ll explain how it all went down shortly.

First, a help for you,  the reader.  We are going to be including at the bottom of each post related posts, helpfully linked by a wonderful wordpress script.  So, if you are interested in learning more about what we have written about the subject at hand, check out those links.

Secondly, We’re going to get a little more… multimedia.

Right now, as we speak, Cheryl and I are working on plans to start video blogging.  Yes, that’s right.  At currently unspecificed intervals, we will start putting original video content on here, talking about our church planting experiences, and our growth becoming church planters.  Cheryl’s got a background for this kind of thing, so I expect it should be at the least well-produced, if not enlightening and entertaining!

So stay tuned!

We had so much on the go.  Friday night was our first small group meeting of the fall, which went smoothly, but it was interesting forging a new dynamic for the season with much more concrete goals and planning.  We’re much more comfortable in doing what is being asked of us as small group leaders, and it feels good to have answers to questions that come from experience.

The fact that my laptop is slowly dying has been eating me alive for a week.  It was very distracting and my incessant attempts to rejig our finances to accommodate the purchase of a new laptop was driving my wife insane.

Then on Saturday I had to go to work, which quickly got exciting (and not in a good way) when we had to deal with a crisis.  I left work for a couple of hours to do what I could, and spent quite a bit of time in prayer over it.  It was good that this happened, in a way, because it completely got my focus off my own materialism (thinly disguised by a need to access my Awana documents and finish the paper I have been ignoring.)  Anyway, with all that going on, we had to hustle to find a babysitter and get out of the house that evening, but everything turned out marvellously in the end, and Cheryl and I had a very valuable pastoral experience.

Saturday night, after we got home, my wife whispered something very exciting in my ear.  No, I am not going there.  It was her agreement to allow me to get a laptop on Sunday.

So on Sunday, church was a run-run-run networking and troubleshooting experience, wrapped up around a very nice time of worship to the God we serve.  Two of our Awana leaders were cancelling out that evening, so we had to scramble to replace them.  We also shifted another of our leaders into a director-role, and freed up Cheryl to cover another place that needed doing.  That afternoon, I did a bottle depot run, picked up a bunch of flannelgraph pieces, shopped for cloth in a tent in some guy’s backyard, stapled it to a board, shopped for the laptop (including an intense half hour negotiation with the manager featuring all 4 of our kids, which did net us a 2 year service agreement worth $140 for free), prepared a council time talk, and picked up two of my leaders with 5 minutes to spare before Awana.

Praise God, my friend from work that I invited out to Freedom Session showed up!  That was exciting to see.  My talk in council time involved a lot of shouting and teaching, along with me throwing myself on the floor at least 3 times to illustrate 1 Cor 15:3-4.  Finally, I wrapped up the night with fetching sandwiches for my secretaries.

On top of all this, I had the joy of hearing from my wife’s lips the long awaited agreement on the need for us to have a shared devotional and prayer time together.  That to me was a huge blessing.  But really, when it comes down to it, nothing this weekend would have gone right without God’s hand working behind the scenes.  I can’t count all the moments where we could have done whatever we wanted, but if God had not been at work, this whole weekend would have burned to the ground.  It’s so much fun to see him come through!

And I have a new toy laptop.  Giggle.