Today I stopped at a local Amish roadside stand (technically they’re old-order Mennonite, but that’s a discussion for another day) to buy vegetables for dinner. “Staffing” it was a young boy who couldn’t have been more than ten years old. He took my order, bagged it, and tallied my total and made change. It was a lot of responsibility for someone so young and he handled it well. As I was leaving, I stopped to think. Some people would say that it was cruel to impose that a child should be free to run through the fields, ride his bicycle, and play with his toys. But the plain folk don’t think that way. Their children are instilled early with a strong work ethic and a sense of responsibility.
I thought about what an advantage we would give our children, if we would develop that in them. The thought that kinds should be kids holds true in some sense, but we can also shortchange our kids by not giving them the opportunity and the requirement to be responsible. This, however, requires work. It requires teaching them how to do things like manage money, make well thought out decisions, and take responsibility for their actions. It also means that we must give them room to fail and allow them to be accountable for their failures. It has been said that experience is often the most difficult teacher but also the most effective. A poor decision can temporarily mean something negative for their lives and maybe even temporarily for ours, but it teaches them that actions have consequences. The final important step is modeling. As we hold ourselves to a high standard and intentionally allow our children to witness that, we give them a lesson in good decision making.

Want to do more than just visit our blog occasionally? If so, user registration and / or the blog’s feed may be for you. They are two different things with two different functions, and so I will explain each separately.

USER REGISTRATION

If you want to have the ability comment or respond to things we post, all you need to do is register for an account. Having account access is open to any of our ministry partners & friends and is as simple as signing up. Having commenters to use a login simply helps us prevent spam and assures that only you can comment under your name. Please note: comments are things that you would like to say publicly about a particular post. If you want to send us a personal message, email is probably a better option. You can find our public email address listed on the contact page of our website as well as at the top of the blog.

To register for an account

1. Click on the registration link at the bottom of the right hand side.
2. Fill in your desired username and your email address and hit register.
3. Check your email for a message from our blog software with your password.

Optional

4. If you want to change your password to something easier to remember, click on the link in the email.
5. Enter your username and password and click login.
6. On the left-hand side of the screen, click on “Profile”
7. In this screen, you can change various options, enter additional personal information if you want, and (at the very bottom) choose a new password.

To post a comment

1. Bring up our blog site.
2. On the left hand said, click on the link that says “Log in”
3. Enter your login information and click “Log In”
4. At the top of the screen, click on “The Eastern Wind” This will take you back to our blog’s main page.
5. At the bottom of the entry you want to comment on, click on the link. It will either say “Add Comment” or “[2, 3, etc.] Comments”
6. Enter your comment in the field and click “Submit Comment”

SITE FEED

Our blog’s feed is an option for people who want something similar to a subscription. Blog feeds, however, are less like a magazine subscription (where you are sent something automatically every so often) and more like a stock ticker or telephone speed dial. They are also known as RSS or Atom feeds (our blog does both).
In order to access a feed, you have to have a feed reader. This is a piece of software that you put our blog feed address into (NOTE: this is different from our blog web address. More on this in a second…) and then the software brings up a summary of new post for you on our computer. Software like this particularly handy if you read more them one blog or news source and want to be able to look at them all in one place. There are lots of program out there that do this (see http://download.cnet.com/windows/newsreaders-and-rss-readers/ for a list) but many popular email programs & services also include this ability. Because I don’t have experience with all of the various options, I will simply list the help pages for some common programs and services. If the program or service you use isn’t listed here, you can try searching their help files or doing a search on Google for instructions.

Microsoft

Outlook 2007: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA101595391033.aspx?pid=CH100622171033#3
Internet Explorer 8: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/d070afb2-09ee-4f69-93ea-afea2e7f12e51033.mspx#ESC

Mozilla

Firefox: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Live+Bookmarks
Thunderbird: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_RSS_Basics

Web Services

Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/tutorials/my2/mycham/my_addcontent3.html
Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvKFP67GwSY&feature=player_embedded

If the instructions for your program or service ask for the web address or tell you to go to the site, enter the address you would normally use to get to our blog (http://blog.weinhofers.com/). If the instructions ask for the feed address then enter: http://blog.weinhofers.com/feed (same as above with “feed” added on the end.

Thanks for reading and interacting with our blog. We look forward to keeping in touch with you!

If this is your first time visiting, welcome to Colby & Theresa’s blog. This is a place where we will post news and stories from our ministry as well as thoughts on life, ministry, and the world. If you aren’t already familiar with Colby & Theresa, feel free to check out our main site to find out about us and what we do or to read our most recent newsletters. If you have any thoughts, comments, or questions, we would love to hear from you. Simply use the Contact Us link above.

Please pray for Colby & Theresa as they meet with the leadership at their church to consider future ministry in Japan. Pray for wisdom in making decisions about allocation of church resources. Pray for Colby as he contacts other church to set-up speaking appointments and begins to prepare presentation materials.