Some Updates for You

I looked at the website statistics for the website this morning and realized that I have not been very present on ye olde blog here.

The cold simple truth is that there is only so much of me to go around. Most of my life is taken up with ministering to homeless and poor folks, meeting with churches and Sunday School classes and such that want to help me do that and, unfortunately, raising funds to free me up to do those first two things. Once a month I write a newsletter and the time to do that always gets stolen from somewhere else, it seems.

Here are a few updates, in no particular order, to get you caught up until I can get back to regular posting.

• I moved from my very uncomfortable, very skanky room over by Lion’s Park (which has no lions in it… I checked) to my very cool, very close to downtown, very affordable (Thanks, A&J!) apartment. There are several reasons for the move, including the fact it ends up being cheaper, it is much closer to the areas where I hang with homeless folks and much saner. It is in a ‘transitional” neighborhood, which means you live a block away from a $400,000 house they are renovating, but you may still find a homeless man asleep on your front porch in the morning. The neighborhood is a lot like my ministry, in fact, bridging between the affluent and the poor.
• There for a while, I was dangerously close to burnout. I was working hours no sane man should be asked to work. Thanks to Bart & Lisa, I have began taking a full Sabbath day each week to recharge (which is why your emails probably won’t get returned on Saturday, nor your phone calls answered). Indirectly, this is also why the blog posts got cut back, too.
• Also thanks to Lisa, some progress is being made on the fund raising front. I really am just no good at organizing, so her pushing me in those weekly meetings to get off my rear and build some structure to support me is a good thing. I have one church that is on board with providing some monthly support and three members of that church provide some individual support. Plus, they have helped me with emergency funds for rent or other basic needs for folks, meaning that frees up my meager funds for other stuff. I promise to write more about fund raising in a separate post.
• I am getting some invites to speak to groups – this is something I am very excited about. More on this later too.

Well, there you go – some things that should have made it into the blog, but did not. I hope you will stick around. You may want to subscribe to the RSS Feed so you don’t miss anything, or sign up for our monthly (more or less) newsletter.