A brief intro: Arthur Sido

Welcome to Christ’s Archy!
My name is Arthur Sido and I am excited to be part of this project. First a little bio for those who don’t know me and perhaps for some who do. I am rapidly charging toward my 40th birthday and I have been a Christian for about the last quarter of my life. Right after I turn 40 I will also celebrate my 20th wedding anniversary with my wife Eva. She has been the perfect helpmeet for me and we have largely grown up into adulthood (an ongoing process!) together over the last twenty years. We also have done our part to be fruitful and multiply, raising eight children who range in age from an 18 year old who just started college to a precocious four year old. A few years ago we elected to educate our children at home and that has been an intensely humbling experience but one that we embrace.
In order to sort of figure me out, it would be beneficial to read my testimony and my document of basic beliefs. My path to this point is far from typical. I did not grow up in a Christian home and came to faith rather late in life around ten years ago. Most of the last ten years have been times of intense spiritual growth. Without a foundational understanding of what we understand as Christianity in America I have been sort of figuring it out as I go. I have found this to be beneficial in many ways to my development as a follower of Christ. Not having certain cultural assumptions deeply ingrained has, I hope, allowed me to examine issues from a “blank slate” approach and as I have done so I have been finding more and more that there are many things that we assume about living as Christians under the rule of Christ as King, especially in the West and particularly in America, that are hard to reconcile with Scripture and the reality of a world-wide faith. While I would consider myself to by quite conservative, both doctrinally and politically, I have also been asking some hard questions regarding what I assumed Christ was calling me to do and be. I hope to share some of that thought process here.
I was pretty pumped about being part of this project. Asking the question of how we are to live as Christians, kind of a “OK I am saved, what now?” puzzle, has preoccupied my thoughts for some time. I love writing and blogging and that is expressed at The Voice of One Crying Out In Suburbia, my “main” blog. At that site I  often think about and write about what it means to live as Christians,  both as the church as an adoptive family and as the church as ambassadors of Christ to the world. I tend to expend a lot of cyber ink and have not mastered the art of brevity but I will try to keep my posts here to a manageable and readable size while also linking to lengthier posts at my main blog that I think you will find profitable.
I look forward to exploring the glorious world of living under Christ’s Archy with you and my fellow contributors to this project!