I'm Still Not Dead Yet

August has turned out to be even more insane than I thought. We've made it through my son's eighth birthday, our twelfth anniversary, and a family wedding. Last week, though, we decided to bite the bullet and put in an offer on a new home. Now, I consider myself to be a pretty simple person when it comes to material things, but we've really outgrown our current place - we're packing three kids and a dog into a two bedroom townhouse, so it's really starting to get crowded. We found a really great four bedroom home in a nearby neighborhood that's within our (admittedly very modest) budget. It's not really that big (which I like), and it has a fantastic yard and a very functional layout inside. It's been crazy, though, since our offer was accepted and we now have to get our home ready to sell. All of the projects that I've been putting off for the past few years now have to be completed inside of a week. Lucky me.

The whole thing really has me thinking hard about economics and suburban life and what these things look like in the Kingdom. By most standards in our culture, this is a really modest home, which is something that's important to us - Joy and I both agree that we want to get the smallest home that is still functional for our family so that more of our resources can be directed towards the things of the Kingdom. But by the standards of many throughout the world, even our current home would be luxurious. It's an odd sort of thing to navigate - I'm trying to be responsible in how I spend my resources, but I still feel as though I'm being wasteful simply by virtue of living in a first-world country. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it's not necessarily a bad tension to experience, I think.

On the reading front, I'm working on a few books that I need to review, so I'm going to try to get those posted soon. I'm also working my way through a collection of essays by Stanley Hauerwas called A Better Hope. Hauerwas is one of my favorite theologians, someone that I think more folks in emerging circles should read. He's one of those rare theologians that manages to critique both modernity and postmodernity with equal force, and he manages to integrate some good thinking on things like nonviolence and economics as well (things that often get left out of the discussion, but that I'm increasingly coming to believe are central to it). I'm continuing to think on the topic of New Creation as well, even though it's been over a month since my last post on the subject - I'm not giving up on it, just waiting for my plate to clear a bit before jumping back in.

I'm Not Dead Yet

I feel fine - I don't want to go on the cart!

Anyway. What a crazy few weeks - and I don't think things are going to settle down until September. Things will be sparse around here until at least then. But that's a good thing too - I've been taking some time off from the blogosphere. I'm about ready to max out the unread posts listing on bloglines - at least I think I am, as the last time I hit 999 unread items it just started dropping the oldest. No joke. I guess it decided that there was no way I could dig out from under that, and I didn't even try.

Time away is good. I think that, being immersed in the whole blogging subculture, it's easy to start to believe that the blogosphere is as real as, or even more real than, the real world. At least that's how it can feel to me, and that's a bad thing. I hit a point about a month ago when everything started to sound the same, when it seemed like everything that was being said had already been said at least a dozen times before. That's most definitely not a good thing.

In the meantime, I've had a chance to catch up with some old friends. I got together with a couple of guys that I've known for ages a few weekends ago, and it was a blast - basically it was an entire weekend of beer, pipes, and board games. And a bit of God talk thrown in - one of my friends is recently back from the mission field with some really rough leadership-related experiences under his belt. Same old, same old - guys in suits who think they know better than the practitioners in the field. But that's not my story, so I'll say no more. Reconnecting was awesome, and I came from behind to win at Settlers of Catan (we were playing Cities and Knights, if that means anything to you) so that was just the icing on the cake. I got humiliated at Tide of Iron, though, so it all balanced out. (In case you're wondering, we also got in games of Carcassonne, Wings of War, Nexus Ops, and War of the Ring. ;)

A minor renovation at home that's nearly complete, an eight year old's birthday party, a wedding, a family vacation, and our twelfth anniversary are all on the plate for August. I'm not done with my current series of posts by any means, but things will remain sparse around here for the next month or so. I can say, though, that I'm feeling more like writing and thinking than I have for some time. Maybe there's something to be said for this real world thing.