On our recent trip to Ethiopia, we had the chance to travel out of the capital city, Addis Ababa to the western city of Jimma.  Jimma is the center of the coffee (buna) industry of Ethiopia and while we didn’t spend much time there, the drive was gorgeous.  Here are a few pictures from the trip.

Ok, once again…I suck at keeping up this blog.  But since a lot has happened this fall, I thought that I would do a bit of an update.  The fall saw me start traveling first to Vancouver to see my mom and dad.  A good but hard visit with my mom needing to move my dad into a nursing home which was a hard decision for her, but a very wise choice both for her and my dad. In October I was able to return to my beloved Ethiopia with a team from Pathways including my wife Kristen and oldest daughter Alexa, along with Garth and Janae Aasen and Stephanie Schindler.  It was an amazing time of reconnecting with old and new friends. The end of November saw me driving back to Vancouver to move my mom from her house of 21 years to a new condo in a 55+ apartment complex.  After hitting every winter storm and 2 flat tires I got her moved and half way unpacked as well as being able to make a quick a visit with my favorite Grubers…. As we head into the Advent season, God continues to remind me of how He provides for and loves His children.  Over the past 2 weekends the people of our church, Pathways, have raised over $26k for our homeless ministry and our partners in Ethiopia!!  As a result, I will be heading back to Addis Ababa in February, a little quicker than expected. I am looking forward to some down time over the holidays, especially as my role changes at Pathways in the new year.

So once again it has been awhile since I have posted.  Many things have changed over the past few months.  I’ll recap here in brief.  In August of last year I attended the Willow Creek Leadership Summit and was blown away by many things shared.  Mostly I was blown away by the whispers of God in my heart and spirit to plant a church where we live.  Since we had only been in Colorado a little over a year, I was mildly surprised!  When I got home that night I shared with Kristen all that I had heard…and, she wasn’t surprised! Over the next few weeks I prayed and shared with others what I was hearing and was again pleasantly surprised by the responses of affirmation and support.  In one particular case, I asked Gil Jones, the pastor of Pathways Church – Uptown to be my mentor in the journey and he readily agreed.  My thoughts were to gather a core and launch by September of 2010.  Two weeks after my conversation with Gil, we had another one where he suggested putting off planting for two years and instead come on staff with him to help build the spiritual formation of Pathways and then after two years the church could potentially birth the new church.  After praying with Kristen and some key partners for a week or so we agreed to move from the Washpark site to the Uptown site.  So, as of January 1st, I became the Spiritual Formation Pastor of Pathways Church – Uptown. About 3 weeks ago, Kristen came on staff as well as the Temple Events Coordinator where she will be handling the renting of our building for weddings, concerts and the like.  We finally get to work together a little more formally.  Unfortunately, the past two weeks our youngest daughter, Avery has been really sick so we just juggle our time at home with church…but she is on the mend and hopefully we can get some normalcy happening again.