This is going to be the last post on this blog for the indefinite future. Over the last few months, I've been thinking about taking some time to focus my attention elsewhere, particularly on some more in-depth theological study and more focused and substantial writing projects. The time afforded by temporarily giving up blogging will help me achieve this goal.

Blogging has been a very beneficial exercise for me over the past years. I've used it as a forum to think through a number of different things, and it has helped me improve my writing a great deal. I will certainly return to it in the future, but for now I'm not sure when that will be.

My online presence will really be limited to Twitter from this point forward, so you are welcome to follow me there. I would deactivate my Facebook account, but I manage our church's Facebook page and can't deactivate without also losing the ability to manage that page. As a result, I will have to just limit my Facebook usage as much as possible.

To all of you who read this blog and have contributed to the conversations over the years, I thank you. I will look forward to resuming those conversations at some point in the future.

Our move to England has involved an introduction to the massive industry of container shipping, which I've found to be rather fascinating. On 21 June, a 20-foot container arrived at our house, which we loaded up with all our belongings. It's now on a ship called the APL Qatar (at least, by process of elimination, I've determined with 95% certainty that this is the ship it's on), and is supposed to dock at the Port of Felixstowe tomorrow morning. It has been fun to track the ship as it's moved across the Atlantic using a tool I found at MarineTraffic.com.

According to Wikipedia, there are some 18,000,000 containers that make 200,000,000 trips each year around the world. This whole shipping industry is really an incredible operation. The ship our container is on holds some 4,000 containers, and can be loaded and unloaded in just a few hours. Below are some photos of the whole process, including loading our container, the ship our container is on, and some photos of the operations at Felixstowe.

It has been ten days now since I last posted here, mostly because I have been very busy in the past little while. Blogging has not taken priority while I have been working through a long to-do list. In addition to the usual work I am doing, things have been quite a bit busier at the church as we prepare for Good Friday and Easter services, and I have been teaching a couple of lessons for our adult Sunday School class as well.

Things are progressing with our visas as well, and it appears that we might finally be nearing the end of what has become a very long process. We will soon need to start working through the paperwork that needs to completed on our end. I have been spending a lot of time researching all the information available online about this process to make sure that we understand what is going on. Given that it is government documentation, you can be sure it will not be nice and straightforward and will take some time to fill out properly. I will leave it at that for now in regards to the visas until we know more.

The silence will probably continue here for awhile, at least until Easter is past. Thanks for checking in, and I do hope those of you reading this are doing well.

If you are a sports fan, you may have already seen this. At the Atlanta Braves versus Toronto Blue Jays spring-training game last Friday in Kissimmee, Florida, Braves' second baseman, Dan Uggla, let go of his bat swinging for a pitch. Mitch Davie caught the bat in midair as it hurtled towards the stands, not even spilling a drop of his Red Stripe beer (notice, too, the near-perfect product placement). Some of the articles out there almost seem to debate which is the greater feat.

What you probably don't know is that Mitch is the manager at the Hertz location I work at. It's kind of cool to have your manager nominated on one site for sports fan of the year. As a result, he's been getting all kinds of friend requests on Facebook, and he's been asked to do several radio interviews. The three guys to his right are other Hertz managers from this area, and I'm thinking they are probably glad he was there with them.

The month of November has gone by very quickly, and so today I resume posting here on the blog. The month off was good, and I enjoyed the little bit of extra time afforded me by letting the blog rest for a while. However, there wasn't as much extra time as I had hoped for—my reprieve from blogging seemed to coincide with an increase in the number of hours I worked this month.

As it stands, the work load shows no signs of slowing (especially with the holidays fast approaching), and so while I still intend to start writing again, I cannot promise that it will be with the same sort of regularity I was able to maintain before. There are several posts in line waiting to be written or completed, but once those are finished, things may be a little more sporadic around here.

For now, it's good to be back, and I look forward to continued conversations with those of you who are kind enough to follow the blog.

With apologies to those of you who so eagerly look forward to the posts on this blog, I have decided to take a month off from blogging.

The main reason for the hiatus is simply that I have too much going on right now to devote time to this space. I'm working a lot and I have a number of commitments in the evenings throughout the week that leave me with very little free time. I want to spend more time with my wife, leave more time for the practical responsibilities of life, and do some reading again.

So, for the next month, I am putting the pen down. I will continue to interact with comments if they are posted, and plan to remain active on Twitter and Facebook.

Posting on the blog will resume again in December.

This fellow has been hanging around our house lately. Here he is perched on the roof of my car, where he stood for about an hour just looking around. I've been taking lots of photos of him, but this is the closest I have been able to get so far.

Things have been silent here for a little while as I've been busy with a few side projects that have taken up quite a bit of time. One of the more interesting things I am now doing is functioning as the worship director for our church, which, consequently, gives me a lot of opportunity to think more practically about some of the issues I raised here a few weeks ago regarding worship. About a month ago, we installed a new pastor at our church, and it's been great to talk with him about these things and bounce ideas back and forth.

On Monday I start a new job working as a transporter for Hertz. The job simply entails moving cars between the five or six locations Hertz has in the Orlando area. It should be fun (especially for a gearhead like me), and I'm grateful that they were willing to take me on temporarily until we move.

Speaking of the move, no news has come out of England yet regarding our visas, but we continue to pray that we'll hear something soon. We just want to get over there, and each day we admittedly get a little more impatient as we wait for some indication of how things are progressing. I think the prayers of our church family here are proving effective—they repeatedly tell us that they are praying for England to fall into the sea or something like that so we will stay here with them. All joking aside, though, we continue to ask for your prayers that things might fall into place soon.

In the meantime, we are slowly beginning to make preparations. We've been selling a few things, and starting to pack up some nonessentials just so that when the time comes for us to get everything ready, we'll have had a head start.

As I get settled into my new routine this coming week, I'll hopefully have a few new posts for the blog. One or two are already half-written, so it's just a matter of finishing them up. Thanks for checking in.