Over the last several weeks my wife and I have been going through the process of applying for a foreign exchange student. My wife received an email about a program in Iowa that was short on host parents, so we tossed the idea around for a few days. I felt this would be a wonderful opportunity to minister to a teen, and perhaps to strengthen their faith and share the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether they are Christian or Muslim. The students for this program all come from either Nigeria or Tanzania, and are approximately 50% Christian and 50% Muslim.

After a week or so of examining and reading student bio’s we chose a student from Nigeria. I am keeping his identity hidden to protect his privacy. We decided on a boy student because we felt for our first year it might work out better due to the fact that we have 2 boys ourselves.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been preparing our spare bedroom for his arrival. The students are already all in the United States and have to do orientation for their stay here in America. They also get to take a trip to Washington D.C. to visit some of the historic sites from America’s history. In 3 days we will travel to Omaha to pick up our student. We are extremely excited to meet him and to start our yearlong journey. We can’t wait to teach him some American culture, watch him experience some American foods (which they have almost no exposure to). In the process we hope to learn more about his home culture as well.

All in all we hope the whole experience goes well and that our student can learn about American life in a Christian home as well as teach us about his own country and customs. If this goes well this year we just may continue to do this every year from now on.

I will be sharing some of this experience on this blog over the next year. How much I will share about our student has yet to be decided, and will be up to them.

Throughout the last week or so leading up to July 4th, I’ve been doing some serious thinking, and praying for our country, it’s leaders and it’s citizens. I think what set this off was hearing the usual sayings around this time of year; “God Bless America.” I have a small problem with what that implies. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that it really dawned on me the irony of that saying. The irony being that this country(that I dearly love) has been more blessed than any other country in the world a hundred times over; and yet we hear this message repeated every year on and around July 4th. “God Bless America!” God has blessed America greatly, and unfortunately most Americans continually turn their backs to Him when it really counts. Most of America only turns to God when they need something from Him. As Americans we pride ourselves on our independence, so much so that we feel we can be independent from the one who authored our liberty. Only when our way of life is threatened do we fall to our knees and beg for God to step in and save us. It really should be no surprise then when God turns His back upon us. We should expect this, however God is more gracious than we could possibly imagine or comprehend. He continually blesses this country while this country continually spits in His face.

Oh how I wish this weren’t true. All one has to do though is look at the American culture, and one can only infer the obvious. We are a Godless country at heart.

This is why I have been fervently praying not only for our nations leaders, but also all American citizens. We continually squander the blessing that God so graciously pours down on us. It will not be long before His grace dries up like a stream, and we are left wandering through the desert.

I encourage all who read this and agree to join with me in praying for the heart of our nation. That God would soften the hearts of American citizens, and it’s leaders to repent and turn to God. Not only on this day of our independence but on everyday that we are blessed to be called Americans.

This weekend Vanessa and I decided it was due time to start painting the upstairs rooms, which we had been planning but putting off. We did end up spending over $200 in supplies and paint combined since I did not have anything to begin with. It has also been a good 9 or 10 years since I professionally painted last so I no longer have any painting gear. We made the final decisions on our colors and took a trip to Menards to stock up. For the paint we decided to go with Dutch Boy Refresh, which is more of a Kitchen/Bathroom paint as it helps fight odors. It also is wear resistant and scrubbable. We figured this would work well in a dining room, and we decided to just go with it for the sitting room as well.

Saturday night I began prepping the room for the paint. I removed all the wall plates from any outlets or switches exposed on the wall. I took the fan blades of the fan, rather than removing the fan completely. Next I put down and taped the drop cloth over my hard wood flooring, and began taping/papering all the woodwork on the baseboards, around the doors/windows, and around the partition/built in wood hutch.

After I got about halfway around the room with the masking gun. Vanessa started in with the roller. She was anxious to get started and to see the results. I can’t say that I blame her as I was curious to see how well this paint worked. At first I wasn’t really all that fond of the paint color, and I was a bit skeptical about how it would look against our dark walnut stained woodwork in the room. As we started painting the room though it changed my mind. It makes the room almost have a warm forest feel. The light green walls and ceiling and the dark walnut woodwork, almost gives a forest feeling.

The paint looked good after the first coat however the texturing on our walls is very rough so this left some small tiny holes and small patches that needed touched up. It needed a second coat.

We let it dry overnight and we started working on the second coat on Sunday evening. we are both very satisfied with the results of the color, and with the paint, which is good because the paint was $20 a gallon. Today I took down all the tape and paper and put all the cover plates back on and put everything back together, and got the room cleaned up. Our next project is the dining room, which I will start prepping tomorrow. Hopefully we can get the first coat done tomorrow night and if needed the second coat by thursday night.

Here are a few more photos of the finished room:

The wife and I are in the middle of moving our blogs and starting a new one that we both will share to our new domain http://reformedchristianblogs.net. The plan is to merge our doctrinal/theological posts/pages to the main blog and use our personal blogs for our personal pages/posts. We’re hoping this will make the blogs overall a bit more organized. We’ve also been wanting to get our blogs on a dedicated host so we have a bit more flexibility in customization.

Please bear with us on any changes you may see on the new site over the next couple of weeks. We are still in the process of deciding which themes we like and in the process of customizing those to fit our needs, so the blogs’ looks may change a bit.

I have not been keeping up to date on the blog here recently, at least not since our big move into the house. I thought I’d update what has been going on in my life for those that have been checking in on a regular basis.

Just Tuesday my wife and I closed on our first house together. Which is a very good part of the reason why I have not been posting regularly here lately. I guess I didn’t realize how much there really is to do when you move into a house and start to do improvements along with the normal chaos of any other move. Now that we’ve closed on the house and are a good deal settled into the house, it’s time to slow things down a notch and relax a bit before the pace gets picked back up again.

I will be making a better attempt at making some more regular posts and try to get back into the swing again. I have been trying to do some studying on theological issues and will have more to talk about once my head clears.

Today I brought the last few items left at the apartment and did the final cleaning. I didn’t do all that much cleaning as I know they are going to take my security deposit and will pay someone to come in and clean the place anyway. I’m also not going to do them (property manager) any favors, since they wouldn’t do me any favors let alone take care of their responsibilities.

Now I am just glad that the move is over (for a few months), and I don’t have to deal with that horrible place anymore. Now I can concentrate on getting ready to move into my new house.

Yesterday we spent half the day looking at carpet for the basement of our house. We will probably get carpet in the main, family room and up the set of stiars going to and from the basement. A small strip of vinyl for the newly repaired side entry, once we decide on what kind of vinyl we want there. Hopefully there will be enough budget with HDC to carpet the second bedroom/office downstairs as well.

I am also really looking forward to going to church this weekend. Due to our emergency move, I have missed my last off-weekend to go to church. That means I haven’t been to church service in 3 weeks so I am ready to get back to my normal schedule, which is only every other week.

This is kind of an off topic post, however here over the last few weeks we have been having some serious issues with our broadband internet connection. Under other circumstances this wouldn’t be as big of a deal, however our phone is over our internet and we need a somewhat reliable connection in order to use our phone. We currently have Cable tv and 3 Mbps internet connection and up until recently have had no problems. Now however we cannot hardly talk on the phone without the signal breaking up. After doing several speed tests I discovered our bandwidth was running at half of what we are paying for or less. We called the cable company and I was treated like a complete moron as if I didn’t know a thing about computers or networks. After several phone calls I was able to get a technician to come out to check out our service. The technician came out and for some strange reason everything worked fine (which was infuriating). Two or three days later my connection was on the fritz again.

Yesterday we did some research and discovered switching back to DSL @ 6 Mbps would cost us half what we pay now and switching to satellite would make our overall bill about $5 cheaper. On top of being cheaper, we are able to get a dvr. We tried getting one from our cable company, but they wanted us to pay them $15 a month to rent one, which is ridiculous. This means we can record the shows we want to watch and not have to put up with some of the horrible garbage that is played on tv nowadays.

We realize that having broadband internet and satellite/cable tv is really a luxury, and not really necessary. We have cut way back on our television viewing over the last year, and are looking forward to being able to filter out most of what we don’t want to subject ourselves to and our children to using the dvr.

So goodbye cable and hello again to dsl and for the first time in my life satellite tv.