The latest

I've got several things over here to catch everybody up on, starting with the kids.

Boo is home from her first year of college, if you can imagine that!  It was a good year and she wrote about it recently on her own blog.  We're so proud of her for studying hard and making friends and mainly for beginning her own life as an adult so well.  She's independent and strong with all that same sweetness that she's always had.

Mowgli graduated in December and came home for a few months.  He's gone again now--this time back to Tibet.  We know he's there because we got an email that said: hey im here.  Part of the adventure is being completely off the radar, so we won't hear from him again until he gets to Nepal in July.  Then he'll be back in India seeing friends in northeastern India and Kashmir until he comes home in August.  We think he'll be home for about a week before he heads off to Cambridge for grad school.  Hopefully, by then, he'll have a place to live at least.  And if not, he certainly knows how to fend for himself!

I'm loving my life and feel so blessed to be in this time of productivity and growth.  What began a few years ago as the Ridder Leadership Initiative with Western Seminary and the  Reformed Church of America (and is the reason I spend so much time in Michigan)  has turned into a large bi-denominational (including the Christian Reformed Churches more fully) and bi-national (the US and Canada) effort to bring transformation to individuals and congregations in those systems.  JTH and I are working hard to keep up and even to help shape the process as God takes us further and further into new relationships and new learning.

Of course, I'm still counseling and I enjoy that.  And the work I'm doing with Mission Houston as we see Faithwalking grow (and Missional Marriage) continues to be so exciting and life-giving, especially as the stories come back to us of transformation and growth.  MarriageHouston is in its embryonic stage and I have to admit that it gets neglected a lot by me although others are nurturing it and taking better care of it than I am.  I'm trying to figure out where it fits in my life and to give it more TLC while it's in its very beginning stages.

We continue to love MBC and C comments regularly about how much he appreciates the work he does there and the people he gets to do it with.  When you hear the horror stories out there in the church world on a regular basis, it is such a blessing to do ministry alongside happy, emotionally healthy people.  The newest thing that is happening there is a new BLESS team to help foster kids who are aging out of the shelter they live in.  I'll probably write more about that later.

So, life is good.  Amazingly good most of the time, actually.  I guess I'll always wish there was more time, for friends and domestic stuff and hobbies and projects but I'm very, very content with this.