With tomorrow being election day (here in the US), I found this prayer for our nation by Billy Graham that I wanted to share.  I believe, as citizens of this country AND citizens of Heaven, our most important responsibility is to pray for our own hearts, our nation, our leadership and our culture.  One cool benefit of our heavenly citizenship is that even though in the US we have to be 18 to vote, there is no age restriction on prayer!!

OK, here it is:

Hey everybody.  Just wanted to give you a heads up that Lori and I just recorded a podcast!!!!  Look for it to be posted later today or first thing tomorrow.

I also want to give you a heads up that this would be an ideal podcast for all of you kids to listen to WITH your parents if possible.  Lori and I wanted this particular podcast to be a chance for us to talk about just general things that God had put on our hearts, so one of the things I felt the Holy Spirit prompting me to talk about was internet safety.  Don't worry, I didn't go into any gory details, but just talked about the importance of families having open dialogue about how to handle use of the internet and what constitutes appropriate interactions on the web.

With that in mind, I referenced some resources for parents to help keep their families safe on the internet.  Here are links to those resources:

Well, we've ended Season 10--the recording part of it, anyway!  We still have to do all the editing, sound design, music, mixing, mastering, mailing, etc.  If you listened to the last Coleraine Connection Funcast, you're probably here looking for pictures of the session as I promised.  Well, I guess I should have taken a look at them before I made that promise.  There weren't any taken of the whole huge group of people that I was expecting.  But there are a few I can share...

Who's foot is that in the foreground?  (hint: it's not a Morrison)

Wow, something is REALLY funny!

Well, I met with a neurologist today.  He did a lot of interesting tests on me, he looked over all the blood tests my regular doctor had taken and he did a scan of the pictures of my brain and spine that the MRI had produced.  His conclusion:  "There's nothing wrong with you"!  So, either I've been imagining things or you guys really did pray hard. ;) Seriously, I am grateful that there's no serious problem to worry about.  I have one more meeting with my regular doctor to talk over what should happen next (if anything) on April 25.  Thanks for your prayers.  I'll let you know if there's any more news as time goes on.

We finally got pictures back from UPS of our server.  This one is of the front cover and shows the most damage, although there are others that show some of the damage inside.  Anyway, progress is being made (very slowly) on getting a settlement from UPS to pay for the new server.  In the meantime, thanks to God and many of our listeners making some very generous year-end gifts, we were able to go ahead and order the new server from Fairlight, so that they could get started on putting it together.  That turned out to be a wise decision on the part of Mrs. Ritchie, because if we had to wait until UPS pays up, it might not be until we're going into season 27!!!  Seriously, we should have the new server in place by the middle of next week (PTL!!).

Now, wi ...

Hey everybody.  Long time, it seems, since I posted an entry here.  Well, I guess the holidays can have a tendency to create a lot of busyness.  Actually, I don't feel like we were especially busy this year, just more comitted than ever before NOT to take myself away from the family in order to do work.   

So, now we're back into the swing of things and need to ask you to pray for our equipment issues again.  Some of you may remember how towards the end of season 9 we were experiencing trouble with the digital editing and post-production system: Fairlight.  Well, thankfully, we were able to hobble to the end of the season and through the 2 holiday specials we had planned for the end of the year, and ordered new parts and software to get the system back up and running.  In ...

Oh, the Joy...

So, our audio editing system (Fairlight) has been a real stable, rock-solid platform for producing Gilead almost since the beginning of the series back in 2001.  But (as computer systems go), she's getting kinda old, and this season has been riddled with crashes and system failures such as we have never seen since we began.  Our plan was to try to limp along through Season 9 until we had a little down time to address the problems and get some much needed upgrades.  But, oh yeah, we're producing 2 holiday specials this year...

No problem, what harm could come from trying to do just 2 more shows?  Well, because of having to nurse Fairlight so much, we've been seriously delayed ...