Toddlers and Scholars

A month ago after Jonathan and Annette’s wedding, we spent some time in Grantsville at a Bender reunion and a Miller reunion. It’s beautiful country and we enjoyed our time in the Appalachian Mountains and with family.

We enjoyed a short hike by the River Road at the back of Mapleshade Farm.

We’re glad to have Uncle James still with us. Later in the day after this picture was taken, he nearly died in a car accident. His car was totaled after going off an embankment, but he walked away.

Grandpa Miller telling us all about the one-room cabin in the woods where he and Grandpa lived after they got married in the 1950s.

We also took a hay ride to the house where Grandma grew up. Now Amish lived there, and they quickly picked some strawberries for us as we drove by.

Andrew and Gregory enjoying the ride.

It’s been a few weeks, but here are some more pictures from Kansas. The boys had their first corn-on-the-cob. It was a winner!

They helped Grandpa Carl knock down a dead tree.

We played at the local Hesston park.

We visited the Moundridge hangar.

Andrew enjoyed his first plane ride in a couple of years.

CMC’s annual conference was held in Kalona, Iowa, this year. Beautiful country with rolling hills and lots of corn. We saw lots of friends and family there and enjoyed meeting lots of new people, especially our host family. The boys really enjoyed their classes and watching Veggie Tales way past their bedtime on the side of a hill while eating kettle corn. Andrew kept sighing very loudly and contentedly. Lisa and I (mostly Lisa) enjoyed setting up a photo display and hearing missionary Dan Byler speak on Sunday morning.

Whew! We’re back from Kansas and Iowa. We’ll get some photos and a report on our trip up here shortly. In the meantime, a profound insight from Kip Kosek’s new book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy:

“. . . the tough liberals of the mid-twentieth century [ignored] the Christian nonviolent tradition’s most profound insight. The problem of the twentieth century, the pacifists contended, was the problem of violence. . . . It was, above all, the fact of human beings killing one another with extraordinary ferocity and effectiveness. . . Pacifists certainly failed to solve the problem of ‘permanent war,’ but the uncomfortable truth is that everyone else failed, too, even the liberal realists. Recent estimates put the total number of people killed by oranized violence in the twentieth century between 167 million and 188 million, which works out to some five thousand lives unnaturally ended every single day for a hundred years. Of course, the deaths came not at regular intervals, but rather in concentrated spasms unprecedented in their destructive power. . . We should take radical Christian pactifists seriously not because they were always right, but because they force us, as they forced their contemporaries, to confront these terrible truths. They insisted more emphatically, more sanely, than Niebuhr and the realists that the elimination of violence was not mere tilting at windmills but the most urgent modern project. “

Jonathan, while watching Rachael Ray: “That lady’s a goooood cooker!”