Hi everyone,
Just in case you guys are wondering how we’re doing with the storm… Volusia county schools are closed yesterday and today, so Mark and I both have off work today. We’re having an “Un-hurrcaine party” at the Allinghouse B & B with my mom (Dad still had to go to work today). We have seen lots of rain and some wind, nothing major. The eye of the storm is still around Cape Canaveral, which is about an hour’s drive south of us. It was a bit strange to have had the first day of school on Monday and then get 2 days off. I went in to my classroom yesterday and got some planning and organizing done without the kids there (which was kind of nice since I didn’t really get a teacher work day in between the summer program and the first day of school). Everyone here still has power so far. We’ll try and keep you all updated.
~Heidi

It’s been such a very long time since I posted anything and even longer since we just let you guys know some of things going on in our lives. So here goes:

We are good and the house is wonderful! We are so excited to finally be hosting friends:-) We have a Bible study at our house with a few friends from church on Tuesday nights now and I am loving it. We have a 2 little gardens… one on the side of the house and one in the back. We don’t have any fruits or veggies yet, but hope to. We have 2 orange trees (which are loaded with little green balls right now), a tomato plant, a potato plant, some spagetti squash plants, parsley, beans, pinapples, and chickpeas. I hope that we’ll get produce from at least some of them.

At ECDC (the preschool where I work), I have been working summer camp this summer. What’s nice about summer camp is that each teacher gets a 4 day week. Tuesday was my day off this summer and I loved getting to go for bike rides, get chores done, have lunch with friends, spend time at the Stetson pool, spend some days with my mom, work on crafts, practice piano, and help out at church sometimes. Mark and I took a week of vacation beginning 4th of July and going through that next week… we drove up to South Carolina to visit my family up there. My brother, Ben, has lived up there for the past year now and we don’t get to see him very often. I miss my brother and loved spending time with him. It had been a long time since we had been up, so it was great to see my grandmas, aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins babies too. We went boating and shopping with them, saw fireworks, dined out, sat to chat a lot, and went swimming… a good trip. On the way back we stopped in downtown Savannah to eat at Panera Bread and walk around a bit. It was really nice.

At the beginning of the summer, I finished the teaching certification I was working on and attended the graduation for that, so it’s nice to be done with classes. I am now ‘Childhood Development Specialist’ Certified by the State of Florida. I already have a 4 year Bachelor’s Degree and am playing around with the idea of enrolling in Stetson’s education program to get my Master’s in Education. The classes would be free since Mark works there. I don’t know… if I do that, I think it will be a while before I do because Mark is currently working on his MBA. We’ll see.

Work is good. My co-worker, Amanda, and I (along with her husband and 2 yr. old son) repainted our classroom this past weekend. The crazy yellow has now been replaced by a soothing light, sagey green color with bright, white trim. I should post some pictures on our website. We have 9 boys and 3 girls this year. It sounds crazy with so many boys, but we do have a good group of kids. Monday was great… no crying, no major behavior issues… I hope the rest of the year goes so well. Every family in our class this year is already an ECDC family (either a sibling of an older ECDC kid, or a child moving up from the 2 yr. old room) and almost all of them are families who like to be very involved and want to help out in the classroom. I am a bit overwhelmed with the planning and carrying out of everything we want to do during the year, but it looks like it’s going to be a really good school year.

Oh, though I don’t have an announcement to make yet, I’m very glad that I have those bags of maternity clothes that I was given, because I just went off birth control this week and we’re now trying to get pregnant. We moved the office furniture out of the 2nd bedroom and are preparing to turn “the office” into “the nursery.” We’re even calling that room the nursery already. I’ll definitely keep you posted on that!:-)

Well, hopefully I can write some updates more often on the computer at home to upload onto the website. I also love how my friend Jen is always sending photos of things going on in her life, so I would like to take pictures more often and put them up too. We would love to hear back from you all too, so respond to us:-) Talk to you later.

~Heidi

I recently read this article, written by a professor I had in college with whom I’ve kept in touch. The article talks about a growing trend in Christianity in America where relevance is leading to a diluted presentation of truth from the pulpit. He is concerned mostly with the fact that many Christians now base their faith on the man on stage instead of on the gospel.

This trend of pastors ditching the Bible in exchange for flashy lights and humorous ‘talks’ really bothers me. We’re not even giving our congregations the milk of the basics of Christianity, let alone the meatier things of the Kingdom. The result of all of this is going to be a mass exodus from the Church. We’re training our congregations to be easily swayed by charisma - the perfect preparation for the kind of deception that will be necessary for the Great Falling Away that will occur when the antichrist proclaims himself to be god.

Perhaps instead of being relevant to culture, we should prepare those entrusted to us to withstand deception and stand in the greatest time of turmoil in human history. Perhaps we should adequately train them in the Word so that they don’t fall away on account of us.

What a thought!