You ready to go?

So tomorrow begins our moving. Actually, I guess it has already begun since there are boxes stacked all over the house and just about all the furniture is jammed into two or three rooms. Tomorrow is just when we get to put it on a truck. Saturday we'll make a trip or two to Brooklet, getting some things settled in the little house we'll be staying in temporarily and getting other things put into a storage building.

It does feel somewhat strange Shannon and I will be living in a different town and participating in a different church next week. I suppose that's part of the moving process, but it leaves me wondering about the relationships we've built here in Eastman over the past four years.

For instance, this past Tuesday night me and some of the high school guys camped out by Tripp's Beach (the lake). We swam and cooked ribs and deer sausage (it was the fire!). Even though we all decided to go home about 3a.m. (too sticky hot, and lots of bugs - plus Cole was gassy), it was great.

And today we had a pool party for the kids. If I had a dollar for every "Mr. Josh... Mr. Josh...", we'd be vacationing in Mexico this summer. But having watched so many of those kids grow through the changes over the past four years, I'm realizing how much I have valued each of them.

The good thing that I've held onto through this time of transition is that our friendships with people here aren't ending, simply changing. They will be different, and will be from a distance, but not over. I've thought of what Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica: "Having loved you so much that we were well-pleased to share with you not only the message of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us." I feel the same way Paul did. We’ve not only shared the message of Jesus with one another, but shared our lives together. And perhaps no one can effectively do the first without doing the latter.

I may get one more post from the 31023 before diving into life in the 30415. (Just practicing my new numbers.) And I found out that this page is jumbled pretty good at the top in Safari (mac web browser). I'd like to remedy that sometime, too.

Technorati tags: moving

How do you tell your mom you've joined a cult?

Tuesday, May 9, 2006, will be remembered as the day Josh and Shannon joined a cult. And not just a cult, but the cult. Our new Apple iBook G4 arrived. I've already loaded about 12 hours of music into iTunes and am, over the weekend, going to load many of our pictures. I'm definitely in the 'little-boy-with-a-new-toy' stage.

Technorati tags: apple, ibook

Hello. Is my blog there?

Ever have one of those friends you haven't talked to in a while because of being busy or headed in different directions or stuff like that, and then one day you think you'd like to talk again, but then there's the awkward feeling about you changing and them being different and you wonder if you should call or not, and you figure you may as well not bother, but then you think maybe you should?

So, it's been nearly two months since posting here. Well, think of this as me calling that old friend after too much silence.

I could give you many excuses about not writing and call them reasons and make it sound like it's not may fault having not written, but... well, they're good reasons.

The news is that I'll be moving to Brooklet, Georgia, May 27. I'll share a little about this transition in the next few weeks, but for a while it was difficult for me to post stuff, because I wasn't sure how much I could share in an open format like this, and it really cramped my writing. (Luke tells me this wouldn't be a problem if I didn't try writing stuff with meaning.) That and the busy-ness of getting ready to move, transitioning ministry positions, and all that jazz.

Technorati tags: blogging, moving