bobwilson.me

Even typing the word “small talk” gives me stress.

Last summer I was back in the States for a week to pick up Hannah & Erin and bring them to Ireland. While there, I also attended a conference with Hannah for few days.

While we were there, another pastor that I’ve known fairly well for a number of years came up to chat about our move to Ireland. It was an awkward conversation. After it was over Hannah started laughing at me (once the other person had left of course). It was worthy of being laughed at.

There are certain events that happen in life that if they had happened at a different time, would have had a very different impact. In so many ways, timing is everything. In 1988 I was going through an internship to learn more about campus ministry. There was a bunch of various tasks I had to [...]

May is a bit of a strange anniversary for me. It was a year ago this time that I was working on the final two Sunday messages that I would share as lead pastor of the Ithaca Vineyard (the church I planted in Upstate NY in 1999). I was also preparing to step down at the end of the month to begin making final preparations for our family’s upcoming move to Ireland.

There are a number of things here in Ireland that from the outside seem quite similar to their American (or at least Upstate NY) counterparts. However, once you’ve dealt with them for a while, you realize that they are quite different.
Not better or worse necessarily, just different.

That said, I think for most of us, we generally interpret different at “not as good.” We romanticize the “good old days,” and get frustrated when things don’t work the way we are used to them working.

I was thinking about high school recently. I was imagining being in my chemistry class, and asking the teacher about diagraming sentences. (I did find diagraming sentences far more interesting than chemistry…although there was the one time when that one girl smelled some chemical without “wafting”..that was pretty cool…she was the same girl who pushed [...]

As I mentioned in our monthly e-newsletter (you can subscribe here), I’ve been trying to figure out how to set up all of our web stuff in such a way that it makes sense.
Although this blog started out as my personal blog, it has over the past year or two become more and more focused on sharing a lot of family/Dublin type stuff. We’d even switched the name of it last fall to TheWilsonsInDublin.com.

The DublinChurchPlant.com site was where we were putting stuff about, as you might have guessed, our upcoming church plant in Dublin.

Liz, Méabh and I dropped off Erin and Brenna on Saturday and drove to the west coast of Ireland. It was the first time since we arrived here last summer that we’ve taken any time to get away…it was long over due. We were originally planning to stay for two nights, but the hostel we stayed at in Doolin offered a free 3rd night. And free is hard to turn down.

We didn’t do a lot. We mostly relaxed. Well, as much as having an almost 2 year old around allows you to relax.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve posted about a couple of interviews that I had coming up. I’m in the process of writing up something about that as well as the whole job hunt experience and am hoping to have it ready to send out tomorrow (Wednesday). However, rather than post it here, I’ll [...]

It is amazing how much you take for granted having internet in your house. While our family would gripe a bit about having only 1.6 Mbps to split among 5 people, we have discovered that 1.6 is much much faster than 0.0 Mbps which is where we currently are. According to the phone company and [...]

At the end of January I wrote a post saying I was going to get the blog up and running again in mid-February. That was the plan. Then last Monday, as I was sitting down to make some updates to the site, the Internet at our house died. 8 days later our broadband company has [...]