Black and white

I tend to want things to be simple.  I want something to be good, or bad.  I don't like gray, and I don't like things to be open for interpretation.  I prefer things to be set in stone, done and done, no questions asked.

But... life isn't like that.  Life is full of middle ground.  And, even though there is right, and there is wrong, there are a lot of things that aren't mentioned in the Bible as being specifically one or the other.  And the process of deciding what is appropriate, and what is questionable, is sometimes not the easiest thing.  Wouldn't it be great if our Bibles had magic 8 balls in them, somehow, where we could just ask specific questions?  That would be great.

Thing is, there is a way to know.  Open communication with the Lord, and patience as we await His reply.  He'll tell us, we just have to be willing to lay aside our silly whims and opinionated thoughts and trust Him to make it plain.

Oh, but it would be so much easier if He had specific rules for all this stuff.  I love that we're under grace, but those under-law people?  At least they knew what was what.  They may have done a lot of stupid and wrong things, but they knew when it was wrong.  Of course, then they would get stoned, or stricken with boils, or suffer a famine or something.

Free will is such a bother sometimes.

By the dozen

I won't bore you with my regular introduction of "we have the best family dinners ever," but last week we had a particularly funny episode that I'll recount in part.

So, we were were talking about the old-timey way of hanging people (throwing them up on stakes on a wall, just in case you were curious), and other random things like why my brother and I long misunderstood Ezekiel 4, and eventually we started talking about clocks. This is because we have a heinous clock that chirps, hoots, and makes other bird noises ever hour, on the hour. It's awful. I took the batteries out one time, but my mom actually likes the clock, so she found new batteries and now the clock is as loud as ever. This is fine, as we say, because what makes her happy makes us happy, but during supper we kept hearing it (it ended up being a long supper, so we heard the clock at least twice, and possibly even three times) and it was quite the topic of conversation.

That brought us to the thought that we should manufacture a clock with the twelve disciples on it! By the way, this may seem like a confusing train of thought to you, but we were talking about clocks, and we'd been talking about hanging people, and Judas was a disciple, and he hanged himself... well, somehow this made sense to us.

So anyhow, we had great discussion about how the clock would look. Would it have sounds for each disciple? Like Matthew, being a tax collector, would have clinky money sounds, and John would have some angelic sound, and Peter and the fishermen-type guys would have... fish sounds. Well, we decided that maybe the disciples wouldn't get sounds after all. But then there was the discussion of where we'd put the disciples. Who would get the 12:00 spot, right at the top of the clock? I voted Peter, but there was significant pull for John. Then we questioned if Judas should even get a slot. Maybe we could stick Matthias instead of Judas. My brother, of course, thought that perhaps we could have Judas at the 6:00 slot, and the clock could show the rope hanging him.

My mom wasn't impressed.

After a while we thought maybe we should just skip the disciples (too much drama!) and just do the twelve tribes. Of course, then there's the discussion about which tribe you should leave out (remember, Joseph got two tribes), and then we started all over again.

I Googled "twelve disciples wall clock" later, sure I'd find that somebody had already invented it, and to my surprise, didn't find anything. I looked only casually, but the closest I could find was a Last Supper clock and an old clock in Prague with the twelve on there, but it's an old clock, and not for sale. Also, there's a rock formation in Australia called The Twelve Apostles, and you can get clocks with the rock formation on the face, but that is, in fact, no help at all.

So one day if you wander into a Christian bookstore and see a twelve disciples clock, well, perhaps it was I, who somehow managed to finagle a deal to design clocks. It could happen!

Tomorrow!

Tomorrow, I'll wake up to a breakfast of coffee cake (best EVER), and write a Thanksgiving essay (family tradition. I pretty much write one every day leading up to Thanksgiving, though), and my mom will read my siblings and I the story of the First Thanksgiving. We'll run around the kitchen for a while, trying to make sure everything is in order, and then I'll sit down (Lord willing) with my family, though just a small portion thereof, and eat turkey (well, they'll eat it, I'll abstain due to my extreme distaste of turkey), potatoes, and other such Thanksgiving-ly food, and we'll muse over how much it is that we have to be thankful for.

That's all. Amazing that that one paragraph sums up my favorite day of the year.

Many blessings

Have I ever mentioned how much I love my Sunday School class? Well, I do. They're the best. And, since Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and my Sunday School class is my favorite class, it's no surprise that I have a great story about the two of them together.

Sunday morning, we learned about Thanks. One of the kids had supplied dum-dums enough to supply every single person in the upstairs, all-inclusive part with a treat, and so we all chorused a "Thank you" to him (well, his family, really, as they sent it along with him). This was perfect, as I was going to talk about thanks anyhow.

We spent some time talking about Christ's work on the cross and how that is the best thing to be thankful for. I had new kids, so we spent time making sure everyone knew how to get saved, and then I gave them all pieces of paper and writing instruments (I'm about five, so we all had crayons and markers and such) and told them to write or draw some things they were thankful for. After a few minutes (I was still writing furiously, myself), I said that if they were done, we would each read a few things from our lists. Oh, no, they declared, they weren't done! They kept writing, and writing, and many pages were filled up.

All good things must come to an end, so I finally had them wrap it up, and we all took turns reading a couple of the things we were thankful for. Interestingly enough, three of us (yes, yes, I wrote this, too) wrote that we were thankful for cheese. I like cheese enough to be thankful for it, but I was pretty impressed with the rest of them writing it. We all had fun explaining why we were thankful for certain people, I had the chance to be weirded out by several of their girls being thankful for themselves, I giggled when they were thankful for things like malls and lip gloss, and smiled when they were thankful for the Bible, and Sunday School, and family.

By the time we were done, none of us wanted to leave (partly because there was still some of the pumpkin log I'd made them for snack, but that's besides the point), and I made them promise to say thank you to at least three people later on in the day. Not sure if it'll work, but I think if people can get through their heads the attitude of thankfulness, that their whole attitude of life will change for the better.

All in all, a good Sunday School class. Those girls are the best.

Give thanks!

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, ever. As much as I love National Grammar Day and Guy Fawkes Day, Thanksgiving tops the list, every time. First of all, it's a cozy holiday, secondly, it usually involves much family, and thirdly, it reminds me how much for which I have to be thankful. Dear prepositions, I wish I could use you at the end of sentences. Things would sound ever so much better.

Anyhow, we all know I'm thankful for my family, and my friends, but there's so much else! I'm thankful for the hope of the Lord's coming. May that hope never grow dim in my heart, may I never stop jumping! I'm thankful for the colors of creation, and for snow, and for purple flowers. I'm thankful for road trips, and speed limits that are 65 and above. I'm thankful for music, and singing, and friends with iPods. I'm thankful for the ability to travel, and for travel-sized bottles of shampoo, and for my Kindle. I'm thankful for regular-type books, and words, and the power to imagine. I'm thankful for sunshine, and the Hey Cow game, and for the Game of Three. I'm thankful for new friendships, and old ones, and ones that I don't even know about yet. I'm thankful for my Sunday School class, and for sleep, and for sleepovers on the roof. I'm thankful for the possibility of GFD11, and for Friendly Vacation, and for family meal times. I'm thankful for prayer, and for family Bible readings, and for the fact that my parents pray for me every single night. I'm thankful for my mom, who waves me off to work in the morning, and for my dad, who lets me be as strange as I need to be, and for my brother, who is one of my best friends, and for my younger sister, now my sister in two ways. I'm thankful for my 11 nieces and nephews, and the three wonderful sisters and three wonderful brothers-in-law whom I never see enough but love anyway. I'm thankful for the years I had with my older brother, and the relationship we had. I'm thankful for laughter that makes my side hurt and tears stream down my face, and for sorrow so sharp I can do nothing but cling to my Saviour. I'm thankful for the human ability to love, and hope, and keep believing. I'm thankful that my sins are washed by the precious blood of Christ, and that through Him I am a treasure, a child of worth. I'm thankful for health, and happiness, and comfort.

There's more. But... it's not even Thanksgiving yet. I'll save something for later.

PS I LOVE this holiday!

Seeking: the impossible

So, I'm weirdly picky about certain things (light switches, microwaves, windshield wipers, and silverware settings, just to name a few). But there are some things that I'm particular about in a more haphazard way. For instance, my room is allowed to be messy as long as I still know where everything is. My books are half packed up in boxes (a girl only has so much shelf space!), and the labels leave somewhat to be desired, but I understand exactly what's in each box, so it seems perfectly acceptable to me.

There's one thing that I'm weird about, though, that has no rhyme or reason. I make no secret of the fact that I tend to keep a journal. Perhaps not as faithfully as I should, but I like to keep them full of enough fodder so that if I don't burn them (this is a distinct possibility), my children will have an interesting view of my life. Now, I know some people keep journals in regular notebooks, but personally? I like to think that if I'm going to all this trouble to write down all the potentially interesting parts of my life, it might as well be in a book I like to look at, and one that is Just So.

This means a few things. 1) It has to be spiral bound. This is more for the sake of ease than looks, but I like the look of a spiral-bound notebook better. 2) It can't be plain. There has to be some distinctive feature that makes me want to look at it. 3) The pages can be neither too narrow, nor too wide. If the pages aren't exactly to my liking, I spend inordinate amounts of time in my journal discussing why I don't like the length of the lines. No joke. 4) It can't look too girly, nor too blah, and it can't have anything that would make me laugh at its absurd cover in 10 or 20 years. 5) There are actually other things, having to do with the type of page, the way the lines look, whether or not the first page is blank or lined, and some others. I'll spare you the details.

All that is good and well, but the fact is, there's no such thing as the perfect journal. I refuse to have the same cover more than once (I think I was hit on the head as a child--there's no way this is normal), and I don't like to have the new journal waiting in the wings while I write in a current journal. It makes me feel like the new journal is judging me for being too slow. So I can't buy a new journal until I'm nearly done (or done, if I write too much near the end and lose track of how many pages I have left) a current journal. So that leaves me shopping (sometimes for days on end) for a journal that fits all of my weird quirks. I never find exactly what I want, but, though great perseverance, I usually find something that fits at least a few of my qualifications!

I like to think that I'm particular in this because I don't like to be picky in other parts of my life. That, obviously, is just wishful thinking, as I am hardly perfect and un-picky on other occasions. So anyhow, this all has been on my mind recently as I accidentally finished my old journal and didn't have a new one! I do now (it took about three days, but I got it), but I had to visit many places to find the perfect fit.

In other news, I realize that if I do indeed burn my journals, it will make all this trouble be for nothing. Maybe I'll burn the pages and leave the covers? That might work. Hm.

In His Image

I'm not trying to say that my parents are awesome, or that my siblings are awesome, or that we're all that and a canister of silly string, but the fact is, my parents did an amazing job at bringing up their kids. There is always margin for error, but at this point, everyone is pretty much turning out.

I always marveled at that fact (yeah, I have this phobia of one day having kids and them all turning into little hoodlums who wreak havoc and don't go on for the Lord), and I know many godly parents whose children have turned out less than well. To say the least.

I had always figured that my parents were just really in tune with the Lord when it came to raising kids (they were), and that they used principles from the Word of God (they did), because obviously that's the best help book for parenting. True and true.

But my dad was talking about it the other day and said something that made all the sense in the world to me. He said that essentially, a lot of people try to raise their kids in their own image. The parent sort of wants their kid raised a certain way, for one reason or another, and that's all good and well, but... my parents didn't want kids in their own image. They, through much prayer and patience, tried to mold us kids in the image of God. No sense having a bunch of little kids like them, they'd rather a passel of kids who live in Christ's image.

Somehow, it made me a little less scared of having (and, subsequently, messing up) children. Not much, but some. Kids like me would be a disaster. Kids following in the footsteps of God? I could deal with that.

12.5

Apparently if you spend just 12.5 minutes a day reading the Bible, you'll be done in a year. It's a new, mathematical twist on the old three-chapters-a-day, five-on-Sunday story, but I find it an interesting bit of trivia. That is based on the fact that reading the Bible takes but 76 hours straight through, which seems to me like using generic information. Not everybody reads at the same rate.

Something to keep in mind on those nights when I'd rather slack off.

Not to mention, if I can devote half an hour or more to read some chapters of my latest novel, wouldn't you think I could devote half an hour (or more!) to reading the Word? To spending time in prayer? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. One of my friends and I were talking about this last night, and it really was strange to add up all the time we spend doing other things compared to reading the Bible and spending time in prayer.

Food for thought.

Rejoice with me!

"What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance."

All or nothing

This past weekend I learned a lot. It was a good weekend. One of the things that was excellent and garnered much discussion amongst the circle I run with was some discussion about giving your all to the Lord. The example used was that nobody would ever dream of talking about getting married and say, "Yeah, I'll pledge myself to this person 85%" or even 99%, truth be told. Marriage is supposed to be a 100% effort from both parties, and it seems absurd to think of someone promising just a portion of themself to their spouse-to-be.

But... really? Isn't that what we do to the Lord? We say we'll serve Him, and we do, but... only on our terms. We want to serve him with the part of ourselves we have left after we're done catering to our our whims. The Lord (obviously) deserves more than a half-hearted effort on our part to be His. He wants us, heart and soul, in entirety.

It's easy to want that. To want that relationship with the Lord, where all burdens, all decisions, all choices, are placed on the altar before Him. But when it comes down to it, we're mostly not willing to go that far. To give every aspect of our lives over to the Lord, to leave nothing for ourselves. It takes a complete willingness to give control. A complete willingness to surrender all. I love that hymn, "I surrender all" but when it comes down to it, I'm not able to say that I truly have surrendered my all.

I'm not my own, I'm bought with a price, but for some reason it wrongly feels like a price, rather than a privilege, to give back.

"Love will come to save us, if we'll only call, He will ask nothing of us, but demand we give our all." Lyrics from a great song from the Fireproof movie. They seemed quite fitting for my current thoughts.

And that's all. For now.

Priorities

I know it's sort of lame to totally steal someone elses's story, but I got this in a forward yesterday and really liked it, so I'm doing that lame reshare thing. I guess I have no more ideas of my own. I'm just recycling ideas of others. It's a sad day in my world.

~~A Sunday school teacher walked into his classroom with a box filled with a variety of items. When the class began, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with orange golf balls. At the very top he placed a white one. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The teacher then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The teacher next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous, “yes”.

“Now,” said the teacher, “I want to tell you that this jar represents your life. The white golf ball at the top represents God, your first priority, who must be first in your life. The orange golf balls represent the other important things in life like your family, your children, your brothers and sisters in Christ, your friends; important things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your health, your education, your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else, the small stuff.”

“The secret to a happy and full life is having the right priorities. If you put the sand into the jar first there is little room for the pebbles or the golf balls. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the important things in life.”

“Jesus said…Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” Matthew 22:37~~

See? That wasn't so bad. Now, if only I'd thought of this story myself. =)

Socks

Has anyone else ever noticed that socks are shifty, strange creatures? I don't understand how the one sock can just go off and never return. My white socks find their way onto my Mom or sister's feet, but the ones with patters and colors (which I rely upon to not get taken by family member, who can clearly tell that they're not theirs) are always MIA! What?

Clearly, my socks don't mate for life. What is this world coming to?

Reach

1 Corinthians 12 talks a lot about working together as the body of Christ, and at the end it talks about different positions and abilities that some of the members of the church there in Corinth had. Then, at the end of the chapter, it says, "covet earnestly the best gifts." It segues into chapter 13 (the love chapter, cue the sappy wedding music), but I've always sort of wondered about that last part. I've heard it discussed several times, that we should seek to do our best for the Lord, etc. (I'm sure I'm getting this all wrong, pardon my potential doctrinal errors), but I think it's a funny way of wording it, if you will, that we should covet the best gifts.

I've always sort of been that girl who wonders what she should do with her life. I always wonder if what I'm doing is all I should be doing. I feel strongly that I should be occupying until the Lord comes (it's been a while since I mentioned how much I'm looking forward to the Lord coming. So allow me to say it again: WOOHOO!!), but there don't seem to be specific guidelines in the Bible about what we're supposed to be doing.

I know that whatever my hand finds to do, I'm supposed to do it heartily, as unto the Lord. Sadly, this seems to include work. (Dear work, I don't seem to want to work heartily. Sigh.) I know I'm supposed to be living my life in such a manner that even under a microscope, people won't have something bad to say about Christians (yeah....), and that above all, I should keep Christ as my goal.

So, back to this whole "whatever my hand finds to do" thing. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd love to really make the effort to reach out and do more. I'd love to cheer more people's days (I smile at people on the freeway on my way to work every morning. It might sound stalkerly, but people seem pleasantly surprised to see some very-clearly-singing-with-the-radio girl turn and give them a big ol' grin at 70 miles an hour), I'd love to be able to deepen my friendships (there are some people I've been "friends" with for years but am only now really getting to truly know them. You know who you are!), and reach out and make new friendships (I have a pen pal!! It was the most random pen-pal happening ever, that started with a random letter to a summer camp and a crudely-drawn family tree that bonded my new friend and I) (PS if you know other people who like to email and/or write letters (I hope to keep postal workers everywhere with enough work so that snail mail won't even have the option to die. Take that, email) then let me know, seriously, because, in case you haven't noticed, I love to write!) (also, I love parentheses. I have used too many today. Perhaps I should give up parentheses as my New Year's Resolution?) (Nah).

That was a long paragraph.

So anyhow, I just feel like as a Christian I can be doing more. More to encourage those that don't have the Light of Life living in their hearts, and more with other members of the Body of Christ. After all, the Lord is coming very soon. We might as well do the most with the time we have!

PS (or PPS? I guess I already used a PS in my post. Then again, can it really be a post script in the middle?) I clearly have had too much sugar today. There is no way a person without outside influence would be using such great quantities of parentheses. Or short sentences. La, la, la. Maybe I'll go hum, or dance a jig. Just kidding, I can't jig. (did anyone else ever think that Jiggy Nye, the bad-ish guy from the American Girl series Felicity, was a weird name? I did.) Or dance. Or stop writing, apparently. Maybe it's time to go bombard my friends with another round of long emails. Clearly I have a lot to say. =)

Daughter

I was going to start out by saying that doing a study of the word "daughter" in the Bible is really interesting, but then I realized that I'm in no position to talk, because have I really looked up all 327 times in the Bible where it uses the word daughter? Uh, no. A lot of the mentions are really generic ones "who was the daughter of some guy out of Bethel, etc." but there are many cool times where it references daughter. A lot of times the daughter in question was an actual biological daughter (Jephthah, for instance, cried about his daughter), but often it's almost like a term of endearment.

Like all those cool verses in Zechariah (and other places in the Bible, I just happen to fancy the ones from Zechariah) about the Daughter of Zion. Maybe it's just because of that song Todd Agnew did based off those verses (it used to give me shivers, no joke), but I love the imagery. "Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel; be glad and rejoice with all thy heart, O daughter of Jerusalem." Good stuff.

But I got on this little tangent because I was thinking of those times in Ruth when Naomi called Ruth her daughter. I know, I know, she pretty much was, that whole in-law thing, but when you read the book of Ruth, the term "daughter" comes off as a caress. A small word that shows how much love and care Naomi had for Ruth. "Sit still, my daughter, until thou know how the matter will fall."

Maybe it's because it's one of those stories we romanticize, so maybe there's nothing cool about Naomi called Ruth her daughter, but it has always charmed me. Of course, Boaz called Ruth daughter, too. That's a whole different ball of wax.

Well. This was random.

My Father's Shoes

Last night I had dinner at my grandparent's house. My whole family (all of the unmarried parts, at any rate) was there, as well as two of my aunts and an uncle. We also had another close friend of the family, and it ended up being rather a party-like situation. But then, of course, we got sidetracked (long story) and started reading poetry. Not like Robert Frost-type poetry, but poetry my aunt has written.

All was going well until we had my dad read a poem called "My Father's Shoes." It's a poem my aunt had written for one of my grandpa's birthdays, and it was just one of those poignant poems that make you cry, because my grandpa's health is failing, and it was just that kind of poem. Well, we didn't all cry. My aunts and dad did, along with my mom and my grandpa. But my grandma? She was in one of those jovial moods and would not be deterred. Every time someone shed a tear, she made a joke. When my grandpa started telling a story about one time when he thought my aunt (the poem-writing one) had died (she was little and swallowed something sharp), he was in tears and my grandma was just serenely saying, "Well, I never saw him cry so much. He really thought you were dead." and just carry on eating like it was no big deal.

Honestly, it was hilarious.

As badly as I felt for those shedding tears, the dynamic between the all of them was just so funny. And there was no way to sober my grandma up. When my grandpa told this story about some girl who held her little sister in her arms as she breathed her last (he was in this weird let's-talk-about-sad-things mood), I asked when that was, meaning how long ago. My grandma just goes, "When? It was when she died!" And that was that. I couldn't even pretend to be solemn any longer.

But it was sort of sad. How many more times will my family be sitting around like that? Even my immediate family is at risk of changing, due to the increasing ages of those of us not as yet married. So, even though I took sides with my grandma and we just laughed our way through dinner, I wasn't quite as jovial as she.

All good things must come to an end though. Except Heaven. That's one good thing we can all count on lasting for, well, an eternity!

The Waiting Game

We play many games. Twister. Dating. Monopoly. Some games we like (Guess Who?, Scrabble, Bejeweled) and some we don't (... Monopoly and dating are two that come immediately to mind). And a lot of parts of life we refer to as games that probably aren't (for instance, dating. Not really a game. I just get tired of what I call "the dating game" amongst youngsters who treat it carelessly, hence the less-than-fuzzy feelings I'm feeling towards it right now), like, for instance, waiting.

We all wait for this or that. Some people wait for the mail, some people wait for a kind word, some wait for a grandchild, and some wait for the eyebrows to grow back. All kinds of things. But I was thinking about waiting last night, as I was listening to Air1 (they have some crazy songs, but I like them mostly). They played a song called "For Those Who Wait" and it's by a band called Fireflight. Now, I'm not wholly certain what the song is about (though it did have words about a "waiting game" which is why I'm suddenly calling waiting a game), but I think it mostly has to do with waiting on the Lord. I think. I don't know. I was driving, and sometimes I pay attention to the road instead of the music. Weird, I know.

Anyhow, the bridge of the song went along the lines of "the pressures make us stronger, the lessons make the difference, the struggle makes us hunger." Something. I guess I could look up the lyrics. No, I'm feeling lazy.

As much as we don't want to wait, it's so helpful for us to wait. And there are so many helpful, and healthy things we can do while waiting (again, this waiting is for anything, be it the pizza delivery guy, that upcoming concert, or for your passport to come). And I think that's the way it was designed to be.

Do you remember the story where Saul was waiting for Samuel to come, but he didn't show up for a whole week, so Saul just sort of up and did some sacrifices, and then when Samuel came (like five minutes later, of course), he confronted Saul about he'd stepped out of bounds and done the sacrifices himself. Well, Saul's answer was that he felt obliged to for a bunch of reasons (the bad guys would get him, the people were scattering), so he just did it.

Please note, I am not an exact translation. Thank you.

So anyhow, Saul just didn't want to wait. So he didn't. And I don't blame him, in a certain sense. I mean, how many of us would just wait patiently for an entire week?! If someone says they'll be at the bus station on Friday, I'm not just going to sit around and wait for him for a whole week, you know? I'd be those people, scattering, and I'd probably be Saul, just taking charge and doing the sacrifices for lack of someone better to do them.

Woe is me. What a terrible attitude! They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary, they shall walk, and not faint.

If you want a list of verses about waiting, see Mrs. B's blog for a very good post on the subject.

There's another song (I'm really into this song thing today, hope that doesn't bother anybody) by John Waller called "While I'm Waiting" and it was used in the Fireproof soundtrack (great movie, great soundtrack) and I love listening to it. It just brings to mind that while we're waiting, we should be hopeful, and serving, and patient. "I'm waiting on you, Lord, though it is painful, I will wait."

That's the sort of attitude with which I want to wait.

Sunshine

I love the sunshine. Driving to work this morning I got a little foretaste of what winter is going to be looking like in a bit, and, as sad as I was about winter (bad drivers, huzzah!), I loved the look of the day. The trees had just enough frost on them to look "fuzzy," and the sun was having a hard time coming up (I feel his pain. I hate waking up, too) and everything was misty, moisty, and magical.

There's just something about looking at a misty valley (well, OK, it's not exactly a valley, but there is a distinct valley-like thing near this airport I pass on my way to work) and reveling in the fact that it's by the breath of God that frost is given.

Oh, and I'm reading Job right now. That always makes me love the weather just a little bit more.

Oh, Election Day

I really can't stand election season. Sorry, America, I'm exercising my right to not vote. Deal with it.

On the plus side, Guy Fawkes Day is on Friday!

Peace, peace (when there is no peace)

I tend to be a person who follows after peace. What I mean by that is that I'm not exactly going to go around picking fights or angering folks at random. I hope. But sometimes my desire to smooth things over is a little extreme.

For instance, if I'm having difficulties with someone, I rarely tell them about it. Literally, almost never would I find myself waltzing up to someone and saying, "Yeah, um, I was offended that you didn't [fill in the blank]." And even with my close friends, whom I love, I don't find it comfortable to tell them that I'm upset about something. I know I'll get over it, so I just say, "Yeah, we're cool," even though NO. YOU'RE NOT.

So I have resolved to be more honest. With my friends, and myself, truth be told, because I say that I'm over something, and sometimes I'm not.

It just feels weird for me to acknowledge that I'm upset about something. I like to be more even-keeled than that. Yuck. But I'll try. For the sake of my friends who do me the honor of being honest with me, I'll extend that courtesy back their way.