life ebbs and flows

though they are dainty, they are still yellow and a welcomed sight after such a long winter. summer school is essentially code for: let's play outside. blue skies are in abundance and make me feel anything but blue. naked gers are almost as much fun as clothed ones.

Congregational Development in Mongolia from Sushil Bhujbal on Vimeo . Check out this fantastic video that one of our friends helped to make. This is one part in a four part series of videos from all over the world. You can find the others here . Thanks to our friend, Chris Heckert and the GBGM for doing a great job showing the world this unique place. This video shares a lot of where my heart is present at right now and gives some insight into the lives of our Mongolian brothers and sisters. Today, Mongolia doesn't look quite like that but you better believe that winter is real.

what i've been looking at: what i've been listening to: lovely bones:the dirty guv'nahs [ listen here ] what i've been thinking about: "...we ought to act with God in the greatest simplicity, speaking to Him frankly and plainly, and imploring His assistance in our affaris, just as they happen..." practicing the presence of God:brother lawrence what a beautiful God who " loves our affairs, just as they happen ."

"All grown ups are pirates." -Hook Each afternoon into the evening, I hear children playing in the courtyard of our apartment complex. There is even a nice hopscotch game set up right beneath my window. At nearly every hour of the day you can hear a basketball being bounced on the finally unfrozen half-court. Those kids stay out there for hours on end. Skipping their normal meals of meat, potatoes and carrots for their third or fourth popsicle of the day. I've found here that spring really just means ice cream. Those words are basically synonymous. When it started being above 0 outside, kids started eating ice cream like it was going out of style. Everyone opens their windows as if to air out their hibernation quarters. Now that it has gotten closer to what I call warm, I've even gotten into the popsicles and open windows. Since the winter solstice we've been gaining 3-5 minutes of sunshine everyday. I've heard it said that in the height of the summer the sun

8 months. 6 seasons. upon our arrival in mongolia, erin and I had about 10 dvds. together. with our first 2 months being completely consumed by the h1n1 crisis, those 10 dvds became quite well worn. so, we began the search for something to watch online. perfect plan, right? you can watch almost anything online. well, not when you live in mongolia. nope. it knows. the internet knows and it says things like "We're sorry we cannot stream outside of the US." I stand by my opinion that the "We're sorry" is the fakest apology i've ever heard. so, i'm not going to say exactly how it happened, but we began exploring other avenues for watching shows online. with a few downloads and a small fee, we could watch things on netflix. come to find out, netflix downloads at the rate of Christmas when you're 7 years old. download 15 minutes, watch 5 minutes. That makes for a lot of effort for a short amount of entertainment. we decided to practice our patience wit