The Exploding Blogosphere

I’m blogging today from Accra, Ghana.  We drove here yesterday and met our Stacey and Jenna, who will be teaching our kids this next school year, at the airport.  We’ve been very impressed with both of them so far and look forward to getting to know them better.

I never know what to expect from my kids.  I was thinking that my youngest, almost 4-year old would be a little shy on first meeting them.  Instead, he has been talking their ears off and amusing us all greatly with reports of every superhero he has ever seen.  He begins every sentence with “You remember …” and proceeds to quote verbatim the lines from The Incredibles, Larry Boy, Spiderman (the old TV cartoons; he hasn’t seen them movies!), etc.  I try to spiritualize the lessons with him and talk about Jesus as our No. 1 hero, but I’m not sure how far I’m getting.  I guess kids just wanna have fun.

More and more of us missionary types are getting into blogging – only after a long, hard day in the village, of course.  Matt & Andrea Miller, who serve among the Kabiye people of northern Togo, and I just round Randy and Kelly Vaughn’s blog, though it has been around for a while.  They serve the Aja people in Benin.  Also, our team is trying to get a team blog going.  (By the way, Greg, it uses Word Press, so I’m getting to try it out for free.)

Some people have described blogging as, for them, a spiritual discipline—a habit of reflecting on their lives and putting those reflections into words that are meaningful to others.  I think I’m finding that not blogging all the time, and not reading every blog as soon as it appears in my Bloglines watch list is going to be a spiritual discipline that I need to practice.  It could easily eat up a lot of ministry and family time—in fact, I must confess, it already has.

I will continue to blog and will continue to read—just try to go for more moderation.  And if you’re one of my friends and I don’t comment on your blog, don’t assume that I haven’t read it.  I probably have, and chances are you’ve said it better than I could, so why should I say anything?  On the other hand, I expect you all to comment on all my blogs, just to stroke my ego and let me know that someone likes me enough to read these ramblings.

If any of you have developed a good system to stay in touch through blogging without letting it encroach on you other passions, I’d love to hear about it.

On another subject, my wife has developed shingles, which is related to chicken pox and is a kind of herpes virus.  We think we caught it early and are treating it, but it can be very painful.  Please pray for her healing.