For better or worse, at some point most Christians will need to look for a new church.  For some people this is an easy task because they have friends or family going to a particular church.  But if you’re new to an area or have specific requirements for what you would like for a church the task becomes more difficult.  With this in mind I present here are a few tips on how to find the church that is best for you.
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For a while now Jen and I have known that we wanted to adopt a child someday. A little less than a year ago we decided that it was time for us to start pursuing that goal. We looked around at several agencies, Jen read a couple of books and finally we ended up settling on Antioch Adoptions as the organization we wanted to adopt through. We put in our application, had an interview and were accepted into the program.  This weekend we start the process officially with the big PRIDE weekend.

We are hopefully going to be keeping you posted through this blog on both how this weekend works out and how the rest of the process works.

Setting up forwarding in Gmail is pretty simple.  It took me under 30 seconds to set it up. Click here to see how.

We then spent four days driving through Jackson Hole, Teton National Park and Yellowstone. It was a wonderful time where Sean got to take tons of photos and we, among hundreds of other tourists, were able to see amazing views of nature and creation. We ended our road trip in Twin Falls, Idaho to visit with the Kennedys (from Alabama) while they were visiting the rest of the Kennedys (from Twin Falls). It was a great chance to connect in a random place even though we live across the country from each other. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday we headed out to Yellowstone National Park. We went up to the west entrance from our place in Victor. Along the way we stopped at Mesa Falls, which is a beautiful set of waterfalls a little south and west of Yellowstone. There are a couple of walkways that lead you down to a safe viewing area to see the waterfalls. Along this trip we saw a lot of waterfalls, which seems to be characteristic of this part of the country with the large rises and falls in elevation. Yellowstone itself has many waterfalls, of which we stopped to see three. The most beautiful of the stops that we made was Painters Point, which gives a great view of the lower falls of the Yellowstone River. It made for some beautiful photographs.

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On Tuesday we headed out to Grand Teton National Park. We are staying in Victor, ID, which is about 45 minutes from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is at the south tip of the GTNP. In between Jackson and Victor are a bunch of mountains, so we had to go over one of the more difficult mountain passes that I’ve seen – it’s about a 10% grade the whole way up and the car has to work pretty hard to get up. Jackson is very much a tourist town – especially with it’s themed building code – all of the buildings are made to look like an old west town. Supposedly many hollywood types like to vacation in Jackson – though I’m not sure why it’s a pretty ordinary town. From what I’ve read most native Wyoming residents think of Jackson as a joke and definitely not the real Wyoming. We stopped in at Jackson for a short time to see the few sights that we wanted to see and buy a couple souvenirs, then we headed out to GTNP.

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On day two of our journey we traveled to Pingree, Idaho. Pingree is a small farming community – there are more cattle than people in the town. Wide open spaces abound, much of which are covered with potato plants. Yes, this is the part of Idaho where the world famous Idaho Russet Potato comes from and boy oh boy do they have a lot of them. Fields as long and far as you can see just covered with potato plants. Pingree is small enough that the streets are named after the people that reside on the street – since there is basically one house per street – so since Jen’s relatives last name is Rossi they live on Rossi Road. There is a gas station/general store and a restaurant/pub and that is the total of the commerce for the town.

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It’s odd how vacations, which are supposed to be these terribly relaxing times, always start with a mad rush to get out of the house.  From what I understand, once you have kids that rush never ends, but alas I don’t have kids yet.  We left last night to go on our summer vacation and that rush was in full effect.

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So, here we are at one year, sixteen days, and three and a half hours of marriage. It’s been a great year of changes, adjustments and learning for us. Especially that learning part! What—you don’t like it when I ask you to pick up your shoes four times in one hour? Tell me again the reasoning behind having a pile of “worn, yet clean” clothes by the bed? Oh, and there’s so much more to learn! Read the rest of this entry »