Crossroads of the Blogs

I have now decided that this blog, which was originally created to try to make money with Blogitive (see second post), will be rededicated to the sole purpose of documenting the unfolding of my "missio dei" (mission from God). It is a 180-degree turn toward writing about my own spiritual journey, from my birth, and from before my birth, for myself (i.e., for unblocking my crammed brain), and a turn away from writing explicitly for an audience.

I need discipline, so I'm going to (try to!) write once a week, and only once a week, to this blog. I'll see how it goes, writing for about an hour. Oh, and by the way, I'm already planning to move away from Blogger and onto a server that I manage more hands-on. (Josh Kidd is going to help me with this, but he doesn't know it yet.) But in the meantime, the writing must continue-- no excuses. I know I contain multitudes of books; the question is merely, how many will come out in the world?

In the spirit of not caring about my audience, I will now note for myself alone that I am also going create another blog, accessible only by me, which will contain a daily journal of the events of my life. "Dispatches from the front" is how I like to think of it.

And now, back to what I was talking about before-- required reading for Servant Partners field workers. The three books have arrived-- woo hoo!! I have never been so excited about a book purchase. The books are:

Title	Author	Publisher	Date
Dispossessed: Life in Our World's Urban Slums	Mark Kramer	Orbis Books	2006
Cry of the Urban Poor: Reaching the Slums of Today's Mega-Cities	Viv Grigg	Authentic Media/World Vision	2004, revised in 2005
Building a People of Power: Equipping Churches to Transform Their Communities	Robert C. Linthicum	Authentic Media/World Vision	2005

These are AWEsome books. I am a little ways into each one of them. I am going to need to develop a discipline of some sort in order to push through them-- together they are about 850 pages. I want to be in a position to transform the material contained in them into classes and presentations appropriate for the members of my church.

Last weekend I went with Lynn Wetherbee and Nancy Geryk to a panel discussion on the future of urbanism, put on for Alumni Weekend by Penn's Urban Studies department. It was an AWEsome panel discussion. I'm pretty sure I want to get my master's in urban planning (or urban design or whatever they call it) at Penn.

This afternoon Angela and I are putting on the first orientation session for Financial Peace University. I can't say how exciting this is, for both of us. I am so proud of Angela--she is a brave pioneer.

So, I guess that's it for today-- see you (non-audience) next week!