Other Writings

For more on my thoughts of the missions thing you can check out my pages of our agency website at www.ONECHALLENGE.org. You will find them at the Honest Answers link from the home page. Just something I do for fun. As you can tell by the dates, that kind of "fun" doesn't happen very often! Have a great Saturday.

The MIssions Conference Walk

I don't know how many missions conferences you have been to but it is a great place to watch people. As you might imagine, in the last seven years I have been to a few....dozen. Most school-related conferences require that their students spend at least some time walking among the various agency displays. It is actually quite humorous. The set up is usually maze-like and it seems that the "game" is for people to get through the maze without ever making eye contact with a single missionary recruiter. Most accomplish it too! Occasionally one will stumble and glance at a banner and then be sucked into a conversation with a missionary which will most likely result in the leaving of a name and e-mail and months of electronic badgering before the agency rep finally gives up. Sometimes agencies add to the "game" by putting candy or some other giveaway on the table. Then the challenge becomes to take the good stuff from the table without being noticed, accosted and railroaded into some cross-cultural experience. Really fun!

Unfathomable

DEFYING ALL REALITY

BEYOND MY WILDEST FANTASY

THE ESSENSE OF IMPOSSIBILITY

THE HOLY GOD

IS MINDFUL

OF me

Just a thought for this day, a Sunday.

Maybe someday I will be a poet, for real.

Grandsons help

So what do you do when you get frustrated? Well, I just look at my latest pix of Jackson and Hudson. Here, you can too. Maybe it will brighten your day!!

What are colleges thinking????

Okay. You would think that on our fourth child we would have the college and money for college thing figured out. Okay. So we don't! We thought we had things worked out with Hope International in Fullerton, CA. Kassen can play for them....it's in the area she wants to be in....they have strength in her major....and they were giving her enough money to go there with minimal debt....or so we thought. Yesterday we got the discouraging news that Hope, like many other schools, does not allow you to stack, or add together, their scholarships and that, in fact, they have a cap on how much free aid you can get....close to $15,500. Now that SOUNDS like a lot of money. Well it is, until you realize that it costs more than $28,000 a year to go to Hope. Where are they thinking the rest of the money is going to come from. I know a lot of people and few, if any, of them can afford an extra $13,000 a year for college. We should have saved! Good plan except that we have been missionaries for almost as long as Kassen has been alive and stockpiling funds for college falls below survival on our greatest needs list. It appears colleges expect students and or their families to be okay with accumulating huge debt for this valuable thing. That might be okay if you have just one child. What happens when you have four?

Sorry for ranting. I just don't get it.

Don't Wait

This form of communication, blogging, is an interesting and difficult thing for an old guy. It seems that almost daily I think, "Gotta update the blog!" That thought is followed quickly by, "But we should know what Kassen's college decision is by tomorrow" or "I will have that picture to add in a couple days" type thinking. But then, of course, age takes over and I forget all about it until the next day and I am thinking, "Gotta update the blog..."