BusinessWeek and Onboard Informatics teamed up to determine "The Best Places to Raise Your Kids 2009". They named one city for everyone of the fifty-two states and Warner Robins got the vote for Georgia.

Here is the criteria they used:

This year we are going state by state. Once again working with OnBoard Informatics, a New York-based provider of real estate analysis, we selected towns with at least 50,000 residents and a median family income between $40,000 and $100,000. We then narrowed the list of towns using the following weighted criteria: school performance; number of schools; household expenditures; crime rates; air quality; job growth; family income; museums, parks, theaters, and other amenities; and diversity. We weighted school performance and safety most heavily, but also gave strong weight to amenities and affordability. - from BusinessWeek

From the beginning, Business Week was adamant that they wanted places that would be representative of where regular people could live, everyone knows that Greenwich, CT is a great place to raise your kids; the goal was to identify where the “Joe Sixpack” families would live…

Together we were able to come up with filters that would cut out the overly wealthy and the economically impoverished cities leaving places where ordinary people could and would like to raise their children. Besides, using economic factors as a means to cut away cities, Business Week decided to implement population thresholds. - from Onboard Informatics

Interesting to me is, at least in the mind of this company, is the type of people my city draws: ordinary. On the surface, I would say this is pretty accurate about my city. Not a lot of obvious poverty, crime, or abundant wealth, just normal people going about their everyday lives.

But, peel back the surface of our 3 bedroom 2 bath houses, 2 car garages, SUV's, and nice church buildings, and move past a life of ordinary isolation by getting into people's lives, and my gut feeling is that life will cease to be ordinary and become messy.

Also, on a side note, Warner Robins was selected as the site for the Little League Southeast headquarters. Pretty cool!

I was browsing over some blogs that I usually read and stumbled upon two new ones that I think may serve as informative for me in my suburban context. One of the blogs is entitled Missio Dei Suburbia: Reconnecting God's people to God's mission. The blog is maintained by Matt Adair, whom I spent four days with in St. Louis at an Acts 29 Conference. I enjoyed the conversations we had and I was thrilled to stumble upon his blog because he is in a similar context: Suburbia. So, here is Matt Adair at Missio Dei Suburbia - The Suburbs and Christianity

In case we confuse life in the 'burbs with following Jesus:

Suburbs = leveraging everything in order to experience safety, security, and comfort

Christianity = leveraging everything in order to experience the love of Christ, who is our safety, security and comfort

A friend sent this to me a while back. If you're interested in creative improv, Improv Everywhere has some really cool videos you can check out. Here is one of them.

After all of the bitterness and fear I've seen in post-election conversations (from believers and unbelievers), this quote from Al Mohler is a breathe of fresh air.

“We are people that know politics is important, but not ultimate. We know that politics has its place, an urgent and important place where, in the City of Man, decisions are made that can make the difference between life and death, injustice and justice, mercy and no mercy, commonweal or common disaster.

But we also know that there is in this world at its very best only a hint of the kingdom that is to come, where God’s reign is supreme.

No government will ever be able to say, ‘Every tear has been wiped away.’ No government will ever be able to say, ‘The blind have received sight and the deaf have received hearing and the lame now walk.’…That power is God’s alone.”

—Albert Mohler, “After the Election”