The last I posted on this home page was in March. In early April, I went full-time in my role as program manager at the Northeast Emergency Food Program and raised $800 in a cooking oil campaign on Facebook for my birthday (thanks to all who helped)! The day right after I was approved to work a 40 hour week, my second oldest son landed in the ICU unit at the hospital with a virus in the sac around his heart. A month later, I too landed in ICU with a racing heart that wouldn’t quit – and spent the next month wearing a heart monitor.

Here it is the last of August and son and I are both doing great – while NEFP is going full speed ahead serving 40,000 people a year. With fall comes a return of Life Group on Thursday evenings, a part of our life in the Mosaic community. Back in the spring I resigned my volunteer work and service on the board of the Oregon Center for Christian Voices – a fine organization whose goals and values I still believe in, but for which I lack time and other resources to help.

Much of this year has meant looking after the needs of a family emerging from high school into the larger world – Robert, our oldest deployed to Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division; Stephen a junior at George Fox U went to nationals with his college debate team; Hope graduated from high school, spent a summer serving in Panama, and started as a freshman at GFU; and Hannah, beginning her junior year in high school, has taken over her sister’s old bedroom. Then there are the dog, two cats, the five laying hens, one part-time goldfish (okay, full-time as a goldfish, part-time with us) – and a garden filled with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, rhubarb, herbs, squashes, onions, lettuce, spinach, cukes, and tomatoes.

But, oh, how I long to get back to writing! I’ve started a new blog at http://hnkconnect.blogspot.com/ and put the old blog schedule in mothballs for a while, though you can still check out the archives on my website homepage at http://hnkconnect.com/. Word is spreading about my new book, Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom, out in paperback and soon to be out in e-book version. And I’m in the early stages on a couple other writing projects.

Last night, I reconnected with an old college roommate in town on business. We talked about priorities in life and agreed the essentials are few – something to the effect of love God with your whole being and your neighbor as yourself. For too many people these days, the essentials are buried under a pile of discardables.

My kids joke about my 30+year friendships as if these were ancient artifacts in a souvenir shop in their hometown in Xi’an, China. Well, such friendships, old and new, are even more valuable. As Barry and I talked, I thought about that line from the movie Shadowlands (1993): “We read to know we are not alone.” Sometimes we write for the same reason.