Today is the day to contact your elected representative....

Unless you also live in Illinois, your phone calls can't be as bad as mine. My senators are Dick Durbin and Barak Obama! Their offices were far from friendly...but they had already been receiving phone calls, so that's good.

Please contact your elected representatives (seriously)

TODAY AND TOMORROW ARE THE DAYS TO CONTACT YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE REGARDING GUATEMALA ADOPTIONS!

As many of you know, Guatemala has been cracking down on corrupt adoption agencies. This is a real problem and does need to be addressed.

However, there are also many reputable foster homes and adoption agencies (such as our own) that are working to provide homes for children in need. Unfortunately, the president of Guatemala recently declared that all adoptions to countries that were non-Hauge compliant (such as US America) would stop January 1, 2008. He claimed that this would include cases in progress which is a dramatic change from previous communication from the Guatemalan government. This is obviously a great concern to us as Ellie may still be in the system come January 1!

I'd like to ask a favor of you...would you please contact your congressmen or senator today or tomorrow and ask them to sign the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI) sponsored letter to President Oscar Berger? You can find out more about this letter and Guatemala 5000 initiative here: http://jcics.org/index.htm.

In the last few days, it seems there has been some good news. Our state department, thanks to the efforts of many of you, has encouraged the Guatemala Children's committee to include a grandfather ammendment into some pending legislation. You can find out the detail on the aforementioned website, but the bottom line is that the pressure American citizens are putting on their government is being effective. The next 24 hours are critical to keeping up the pressure!

Parents of Miss Teen South Carolina

Guess who met John Piper?

Uh...that would be me.

This past weekend, we went to Minneapolis to visit Bethlehem (Piper's church) and Wooddale Church (Leith Anderson's church...he's the new president of the National Association of Evangelicals).

We went to the Saturday evening service at Bethlehem and were able to say hi to Pastor John after the service. I tried to just shake his hand and not take up too much of his time, but he was very gracious and asked about what brought us to Minneapolis, etc. He enjoyed hearing about Bethany Baptist and mentioned that he quotes Pastor Ritch frequently in his sermons, too.

The first week of sabbatical was very productive. I wrote about one hundred fifty pages combined for papers on my DMin class and finished going through a seminar called "The Nehemiah Strategy." The seminar is designed to help with long-term strategic planning.

I'm looking forward to week two!

Watch this second...

...and skip to about two minutes in.

Feist - 1 2 3 4

This is the song on the new ipod commercials. It reminds me of the "Here We Go Again" video in that the entire thing is a single take...even the end...right?

Sabbatical: Day One

My seven week sabbatical (plus some vacation time) began a little bit before six this morning. I went to the Central pool and swam a mile and a half then came back and had breakfast with the kids. After breakfast, we did a little cleaning and in a little while I'll begin working on some of my DMin papers. My goal is to finish at least a rough draft of my last paper today and begin editing.

A lot of people have asked what we're planning on doing on the sabatical so I thought I'd sketch at least a broad overview of our objectives:

Church Plant: Working on the church plant is the primary purpose of the sabbatical. I will be
doing so by visiting churches, vision casting, studying leadership development, laying out a four-year plan, and spending time daily just to brainstorm.

Personal Growth: I will be finishing some DMin work during this period as well. I'm going to try to knock this out within the first week. There are also quite a few books I'd like to read.

Family: I'm going to try to spend quite a bit of time with the family in the evenings especially. It will be nice to be able to not have a lot of things competing with our schedules. When we're in Texas, we plan on visiting lots of churches but also spending time with extended family. Whitney and I will take a vacation together and then run the White Rock Half Marathon in Dallas.

I'm not really a person who enjoys "relaxing," but I'll also try to decompress at least a little bit.