I am sorry to see that it is nearly a year since I last posted here. I never intended to stop blogging, and I might yet start again regularly. Meanwhile Gentle Wisdom is still getting over 100 visits most days. The issue is that life has been busy for me here in Virginia, as the manager of a growing business and an active member of a lively church. At least by posting occasionally I can reassure anyone still following this blog that I am alive and well.

Sadly I cannot say the same about my fellow blogger John Richardson, who blogged as The Ugley Vicar and elsewhere. This morning I heard the sad news that, after a short illness, he has passed away and gone to be with his Lord.

John was in fact the only other regular blogger who I also met, more than rather briefly, during the time we were blogging. For a time we both served on the committee of the Chelmsford Diocesan Evangelical Association. We had several other things in common: not only were we members of the Church of England in the same diocese, but we also started blogging as single men in our 50s, and we both got married for the first time as bloggers (but not to bloggers!) and continued to blog as married men.

There were of course many issues which we disagreed on, and enjoyed sparring about. He would probably remember me best as the person who repeatedly advised him to leave the Church of England – in each case because he would not accept a decision of the church leadership. Ironically, he remained within that church while I left it. But then for him the Church of England was a body he was ordained into and deeply committed to, even when he disagreed with its leadership, whereas for me it was little more than the denomination I happened to be in at the time.

Nevertheless on what mattered John and I were united: on the heart of the gospel, and on the pressing need to see that message presented clearly to the people of England and of the whole world. He will be sadly missed.

My wife Lorenza and I are taking a trip to the USA for the next three weeks. We will be based in the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia, where we expect to spend Thanksgiving with our good friends. We will then be sorting out some business matters – and also hope to have some time to see the area. We leave tomorrow morning, 22nd November, and should be home on 14th December.

I hope to be able to finish off the series Cross or Resurrection. But otherwise I don’t know yet if I will have time for blogging while we are away.

We will be sad to miss Tim and Marci Chesterton, whose own transatlantic trip coincides with ours. But we look forward to making new friends and business contacts, as well as to seeing and celebrating with our old friends.

Kurt Willems writes I’m not a Christian blogger, I’m a blogger who’s a Christian. I would say the same, and echo Kurt’s reasons for saying it.

Most of my posts on this blog include some kind of explicitly Christian material, about the Bible, Christian teaching or my own beliefs. My last few posts, for no particular reason, have not done so. My primary purpose in blogging is not to promote the Christian faith, although I am happy to do so – and my series Follow Jesus does have this purpose. I blog mainly to express and discuss what is important to me, and a lot of that does concern my faith.

Meanwhile I am working, or at least thinking of working, on more explicitly Christian posts. So watch this space.

Gentle Wisdom has gone international! The .uk suffix has been dropped from its URL, which is now simply gentlewisdom.org, with an optional www. prefix. The old URL and old links to individual posts should still work, with redirection to the new locations. But I would recommend updating links in blogrolls etc.

The blog is now also hosted “internationally”. I bought an “unlimited” hosting plan with a US-based hosting company, justhost.com*, which includes the new domain name. That is one reason for the change.

It also makes sense for Gentle Wisdom to have a more international identity as currently less than 20% of visits here are from the UK, and nearly 60% are from the USA. But this will continue to be a British based blog, written in British English (but a few Americanisms might slip in) and offering a British perspective even when commenting on other countries’ affairs.

I hope that yesterday’s work in progress is now complete. If you notice any problems, please let me know by a comment here or through the contact form.

* This is an affiliate link. So if you are looking for hosting, please click on it, or here, or on the sidebar ad, and I will receive a commission when you sign up.

I am working on some upgrades to this blog including a move to a new server. This means that for the next day or two it may, at least intermittently, be unavailable or closed to comments. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Watch this space for announcements about the changes when they are complete.

I would like to apologise to my readers for some broken links from one post to another on this blog in the last few days. The problem is with links from before I set up the separate Gentle Wisdom domain in 2009. Old links of the form http://www.qaya.org/blog/?p=nn are not working. They can be made to work by changing the link to http://gentlewisdom.org/?p=nn.

This is, I hope, a temporary problem. It has come about because I moved the domain registration for qaya.org to the same company which hosts my blog and manages the registration for gentlewisdom.org.uk.

For those interested in the technicalities, the old registrar had no problem redirecting qaya.org/blog/ to gentlewisdom.org.uk/qaya/blog/, which then redirects to gentlewisdom.org.uk/. The new registrar claims that this cannot be done, and that I cannot even redirect all traffic for qaya.org to qaya.gentlewisdom.org.uk (which redirects as wanted), without purchasing a separate hosting package for qaya.org. This is despite their clear advertising domains to be registered as aliases for other domains. For the moment I am not naming and shaming the hosting company in the hope that they find a solution. At the same time I am working on my own independent solution.

Meanwhile blogging here is slow as my wife and I are in the process of moving home, for the moment back to Chelmsford, Essex, where we were living last year.