Our YouTube channel is back!
After eight years of radio silence, we are reviving our YouTube channel. Our first new video offers three announcements about Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life:
Here is the short version:
- We have moved from Africa to South America.
- We are re-starting our YouTube channel!
- We have set up a Patreon so that you can support our work.
Over time, we expect to improve the quality of our videos. But you have to start somewhere!
Though the articles here on the website can go into greater depth, we hope you’ll enjoy brief presentations in video format of many of the new posts here. Our goal is to return to our former practice of putting up at least one new post per week, usually on Sunday. Where appropriate, we’ll also put up a YouTube version.
See you next Sunday!
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
Some more feedback: the icons in the “Recent Comments” section are really small now.
Hi K,
Hmm. They still look the same to me. I didn’t change anything in that section of the navbar. I also don’t have any control over the size of the icons. That’s something built into the hosting software.
Hi K,
As it turns out, there is a setting available for the size of the icons in the “Recent Comments” section. I tried out the next size up, but on my screen it looked really bad. The alignment between the icons and the comments is off (nothing I can do about that), and it made it look even worse.
I did do some further rearranging of the different items in the navbar, moving items that seem more useful, and more used, farther up, and others farther down. Let me know if you have any feedback on the new arrangement. Thanks.
If you don’t mind me asking, why did you move to South Africa and then to South America? I recall when you worked from this church in Bridgewater.
Hi K,
That is a long, complicated, multifaceted story. But one key point is that living in the U.S. has become very expensive and highly regulated. Even in one of the less expensive cities (Cheyenne, Wyoming), we both had to work a lot of hours. In the developing world, we can live comfortably on a single part-time income, leaving much more time to devote to our other interests and goals, such as this blog and reviving the associated YouTube channel. In other words, I can spend more time spreading the good word. Annette also has plans and goals that she was not able to pursue as long as we were living in the U.S.
We went to South Africa because there is a well-established New Church (Swedenborgian) church there, and I could be useful to it by teaching in its seminary, which I did for four years. The plan was to stay there long-term. We love the South African people and culture, and I greatly enjoyed teaching and preaching in New Church of Southern Africa.
Unfortunately, the South African government is highly corrupt and dysfunctional. There were constant fire drills, sometimes literally: while we were living on the church property in Soweto we had to put out three brush fires that were threatening to burn down our house and the parsonage next door. We did not have the peace and stability required to focus on our own goals and projects. Over time it became impossible for us to continue living in South Africa. We attempted to get residency in neighboring Botswana, but we were denied because, quite frankly, we don’t have the money to buy our way in. No other country in Africa was going to be any better.
When it became clear that sadly, we would not be able to stay in Africa, we moved to South America, where there is no New Church, but where we can live a peaceful, low-cost life and continue to pursue our goals.
If you’re interested in reading more about our time in South Africa, Annette wrote two excellent articles, one of them a two-parter, that were published in The Messenger, which is the magazine of the Swedenborgian Church of North America. The links are to PDFs of the issues that contain the articles: