three more years

All of the yard signs, radio commercials, and ringing doorbells paid off this weekend as I was voted back on to the council of elders at Cornerstone this weekend. Actually one of the things I really like about Cornerstone is how unlike the normal policial process our leadership selection is. There are some churches where "name recognition" is actually one of the best predictors of who will end up serving in leadership. At Cornerstone people are asked to serve as elders based on evidence of fruitful and faithful service in other capacities in the church and in meeting the Biblical qualifications for being an elder. In politics you get more responsibility by relentless self-promotion. In the church, it ought to come from humble service. Whenever I think about that I end up feeling challenged. Academia is a lot like politics in terms of the culture of self-promotion and I think pride is one of the sins I struggle with most. When I think about how Jesus, king of the universe, washed feet and spent his time with tax collectors and fisherman I realize how far I have to go to have the same kind of humble, servant love that Jesus had.

First pictures of the cruise

Here are a few pictures from our recent cruise. They're the best ones that actually have us in them, which I've noticed is really what other people want to see when they're looking at vacation pictures. Therefore, I will not likely post the 12 pictures of mayan temples, 24 pictures of faraway animals on our river trip, or 20 pictures of sunsets. The next post will probably be 12 pictures of beautiful food, though! :)

Pictures of moving chaos

The above pix are after we painted our basement. Blogger isn't cooperating, so I apologize for the order and sideways-ness.

Here's a picture of our basement before we painted it.

More chaos here. In the top picture you can see our cat enjoying a sunbeam amidst the chaos. At that stage we were getting ready for our "garage giveaway", which you can see in the bottom left picture. We got rid of a lot of stuff just by setting it in our driveway and posting a Free sign. I also advertised on Freecycle.

On the bottom right, you can see Alex reading in our kitchen. We got the carpets cleaned, so everything (except beds) had to be moved into the kitchen and upstairs bathroom. What a pain that was, but the carpets look great.

That, along with packing and cleaning, has been our life for the last month!