Update on the move

You might think that being called as a pastor was the hard part and that moving would be the easy part, but you would be wrong - at least in our case. What has seemed to be a blessing for the past 4 years - owning a house a short walk from campus, is turning out to be a bit of a headache. With the downturn in the housing market, uncertainty in the economy, difficulties in the mortgage market, and everything else that seems to be going on, trying to move and buy a house while still owning a house is turning out to be difficult. Not impossible, but certainly not as smooth as we had hoped.

Today was appraisal day for our bridge loan. Our appraiser may be good at his job, but he spread enough doom and gloom about the current housing market to make one wonder if it is possible to sell a house at any price. We have not seen the appraisal yet, but he indicated that housing appraisals today are much lower than anyone expects. We'll just have to see.

On the other hand, we do have a place to stay, and we have begun moving things into the church office. Things will happen, we will still begin on September 1, but our move is postponed for a little while. In the meantime, we hope and pray that someone buys our house and/or that the appraisal is better than the dashed hopes the appraiser left us with.

In the meantime, Internet access is going to be limited to daytime working hours while we are in the office. Not that we have been posting very regularly lately anyway, but it may get worse before it gets better.

In the meantime, we are wondering about the future of the blog. We are soon to be ex-seminarians (sort of already are) as we will be ordained next week (we will post pictures!). What should the blogging future hold for us? A new blog more closely associated with the church? Individual blogs about ministry? If you have any ideas, let us know. We will be giving this some thought as well. While email is great, Facebook is fun, the blog is still our best way of letting you know what we are up to, as well as providing us an outlet for our thoughts.

We keep all in the path of Gustav in our prayers, and watch its path through the Gulf of Mexico. For all of our friends on the Gulf Coast, our prayers are with you. May God keep you safe.