If anyone does a couple clicks of research, you will find that ProTheist hasn’t done much over the last several months. This post is intended to update anyone who may want to know what’s been going on with ProTheist and what will be going on with it.
A Quick Review of 2011
I started out 2011 with a bang by quitting my stable job of almost five years to take a 30% pay cut in order to go work for a non-profit whose work was focused in Gulu, Uganda. I was excited about this opportunity as I would be doing full-time design work with the potential to write curriculum for a Bible college the organization had built in Africa. A young husband and wife who have now become some of my best friends took us in and let us live with them for the duration of my employment.
Two days into my new position I found out my wife was pregnant with number two. Two months into my new position, I was laid off, due to poor financial decisions made by leadership overseas.
But I didn’t panic. I started praying and thinking of what God may be trying to guide us towards. Since my wife and I had been feeling for some time that we should leave CA, we started praying about that. When Jamie’s cousins offered to let us move in with them in Ohio till we got situated, we focused our prayers on that opportunity. After about seven or eight clear indications that this is what God wanted us to do, we packed up our things and headed out.
Since arriving in Ohio, I have taken a full time job as a website designer/developer and gotten involved in a great church that has warmly welcomed a strange family from a far off land. We finally got into our own place about two months before my wife gave birth to our second daughter and quite honestly, things have quite simply been chaos since then; which in part has contributed to my lack of writing and research.
Anything Else?
Since my second daughter’s birth, I have stressed a lot about finances, spent some time on my knees in prayer begging God to help make ends meet. This has lead to a series of about four different business ideas that I spent quite a lot of time on, doing research only to realize that it wasn’t what I really something I was passionate about.
Additionally I read a few books and many blog posts about discovering what I would like to do, and to be quite honest, in every list I laid out and every chart I completed, three things stood out that I love doing. Studying theology, teaching people and improving marriages. Without the ability to do these three things, I really feel like my unique and common giftings would go to waste.
The Future of ProTheist
That being said; after everything was said and done, I realized that ProTheist is what I am passionate about and honestly, it is what I feel is the best use of my abilities. Starting this week I am going to start establishing a business plan for ProTheist and put together a schedule of things to accomplish for the site. In addition, I am going to start working on the long list of over fifty articles that I want to write and see if I can start teaching some classes or speaking at events to cover some of the things that are written here.
So while my site ratings have plummeted and interest in the site has decreased over the last few months, ProTheist is here to stay and, Lord willing, will become a much greater resource as time goes on.