Catching up

I haven't written much here because I've mostly been writing on facebook these days. What can I say? I love September. It means things are starting to cool off in the US. Here things are about the same, but I can still note a difference in the climate in September. Perhaps its because the Earth is approaching that position where the sun falls equally across the whole planet, right before it starts shining more on the South pole and less on the North pole.

My wife and I keep saying "we got to get Crown going". Or maybe its me that keeps saying this. We want to have a meeting with all potential leaders at our house (or any where) and then kick it off. I depend too heavily on her for our social calendar. I've learned, before I do anything involving our house, I got to get her involved. She's not as socially minded as I am I guess. Its kind of frustrating.

I'm coming out of a recent fit or Spiritual struggle or Theological turmoil. Trying to truly understand my position before God. I'm reminded and truly realize that I am deserving of Hell. At the same time, I realize there is nothing that I can do to change that. Only God changes that.

This passage of scripture has been extremely important to me. It shows me that God does not save the righteous but actually the ungodly (and not by their works).

Romans 4:5-8

But to him who does not work
but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly,
his faith is accounted for righteousness,
just as David also describes the blessedness of the man
to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works:
"Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
And whose sins are covered;
Blessed is the man to whom the LORD shall not impute sin."

Other passages of scripture that show God's might and love at the same time:

Isaiah 59:1 "Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, That it cannot save; Nor His ear hearing, That it cannot hear."

Isaiah 43:25 "I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; And I will not remember your sins..."

The entire chapter of Psalm 107. I've really dissected this one over the past month.

• verse 10 and 11 talk about some people rebelling against God.
• verse 12 shows the consequences of the rebellion
• verse 13 shows the rebels crying for help and God's immediate response to them crying out. (It's immediate)
• verse 14 goes into what God does immediately and what He does to protect them
• verse 15 This verse is repeated several times through this whole chapter. We should give thanks to God.
• verse 16 God is a warrior who rescues.

One thing I found that was really neat was correlating verses 21 and 22 with Romans 12:1-2

Psalm 107:22: "Let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving, and declare His works with rejoicing!" contrast that with Romans 12:1-2 where we are to be living sacrifices.

Here's a link to an ebook that I just found last week and have been reading through. It's really good for those who over analyze things like I do. http://www.thenakedgospel.com/download

While I'm on this note of how God rescues, I watched the movie "Taken" twice this past summer. The father in the movie is a symbol of God. His daughter is symbolic of us. She goes completely against her dad's wishes and finds herself in the worse kind of trouble that any human could imagine. What does the father do? Well, like God, He goes and finds her. He kicks a bunch of butt and kills a lot of people who get in the way of him trying to save his child. In the end, against incredible odds, he saves her. But there's more: The father had an option for his daughter before her rebellion. He had a better plan, however she did not even give him a chance to present it and went about doing what she wanted to do. At the end of the movie, the daughter was shown her dad's plan (finally) and was thrilled because it was a desire of her heart. This movie reminds me a lot of that part of Psalm 107.

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Crown Update

It's been a while since I posted here in this blog. I've been putting most of my posts on facebook in the form of notes. At any rate, I thought it would be good to post a Crown Update.

A Crown group just finished up early December 2008. This group was the 4th group to participate in the study since my wife and I began facilitating Crown in our current church. This was supposed to be the first group without direct participation from either me or my wife; however, one of us ended up attending 1/2 of the meetings.

About 10 or 12 people participated in the study. The leaders who ran the group started Crown with us a year earlier, as well as the co leaders. One couple (from this group) has volunteered with out us asking, to lead the next group. This is exciting for me, as it looks like the study is going to take root in that church.

During one of the studies, a very educated woman pointed out on a side note how Capitalism had failed as evidenced by the economic crisis in the United States. Oh man, how I bit my tongue! But I did quickly point out, that it was not Capitalism that failed but a form of Socialism that is failing the people of the US right now. I did not go into a lot of detail at that time as I thought it was out of place for the study.

After the study, I found 2 kindred spirits. It turns out that the co leaders of this group own their own store and hate socialism as much as I do. I found that very interesting.

As I mentioned, during the study, we did not debate politics or economic systems but kept the study on track. Its more important to study God's word, apply it and then be set free. That's the purpose of the Crown study.

Not all change is good change.

What do you trust?

Where is your hope?

Many people trust different things many of which are tangible or intangible. Some folks trust in their abilities and in their track record of getting stuff done. Others trust in the cash or assets they have.

The Christian and Muslim trust that there is a God, the atheist trusts that there is not one.

Some trust in their doctrine or theology, trusting in their vast knowledge of Biblical texts.

But when you’re down and all you can see is absolute chaos, what are you trusting in; where is your hope?

John McCain appears to be closing the sale

Ever since John McCain clinched it for the Republicans, us Constitutionalists and Conservatives have been grumbling. John McCain's voting record is somewhat sporadic, with him acting like a Democrat from time-to-time.

I've been saying, McCain needs to do something to get the base. To do that I've said that he needed to do the following:

1. Convince us that he'll put good Constitutionalist judges on the High Court.
2. Pick an Evangelical Christian governor as his running mate.

We need to know that he'll pick judges that will not invent law that does not exist. He also needed to balance out his streak of liberalism.

I think the Rick Warren interview convinced us on the way he'll select judges.

Concerning his VP, looks like he's picked the evangelical Christain governor, but gone a step further.

Until today, I've never heard of Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. A quick check on wikipedia, exposes her obvious evangelical Christian back ground. On the surface so far, she's looking real good.

He went over the top, by picking a woman. Brilliant. I think this will help bring over some of the disgruntled Hillary supporters.

I'm not saying that I'm convinced yet on Palin. But the "package" on the Republican side is looking more attractive.

Your SUV and George Bush are destroying Mars!

I just read a fascinating article about similarities between Alaska and Mars.

Click her for source article.

A pair of scientist, noticed that some formations in a Martian photo were similar to some in an Alaskan photo. They set out to find what caused the pattern in the Alaskan photo. They determined that it was avalanches. A side note in the article said that they speculated that these avalanches were being caused by climate change.

They sent their results to NASA. Sometime later, NASA was able to get a picture of a real life avalanche happening on Mars. Pretty cool. The avalanche was being cause by ice breaking up.

I suppose this avalanche also was being caused by climate change on Mars. Everybody knows that global warming and climate change is happening because of your SUV and George Bush. I just did not know that the problem was as bad as it is! So bad that we are affecting the climate on Mars! Quick! Somebody needs to alert Al Gore and the United Nations!

Airing Laundry In Public

Disclaimer: This post lacks much tact and borderlines, if not crosses the boundary into pure gossip. In fact, this post is very immature. I believe that every man has an adolescent living in him; perhaps that's why I'm posting this.

Background: My neighborhood is somewhat uppity. Maybe a better word is wannabe uppity. Or even better description would be, others think that we're uppity. Yeah, that's really how it is. We're just regular folk - like the name of this blog. By US standards, my house and the other houses here are kind of regular, somewhat humble. (What we do have better than US houses is that our houses are made of 100% concrete - which rocks!) Our houses are just much smaller than US middle class houses.

The neighborhood behind ours sits somewhere between ours and zero on the "neighborhood class" spectrum; so the folks from there have hinted to me. I've heard people specifically make distinctions between my neighborhood and the one behind ours (and most of those folks happen to be from the neighborhood behind ours). The funny thing is, if you get on my roof, you see that it really looks like one neighborhood - us with them as one. In fact, the back wall of my house touches the back wall of the house in the neighborhood behind mine.

The Story: A new family moved into the neighborhood. Great! New neighbors! So I try to be friendly, maybe too friendly. I'm careful to always say hi and talk with them, engage in small talk - you know the general kind of stuff to make people feel welcomed. Then one day, to everyone's dismay the Mrs of this family started doing this to the vacant lot in front of her house:



WHAT THE HECK !!!!????
This, actually is a more pleasant photo. At times we can see clothes that you really shouldn't just do stuff like this with. So, my wife and I talked about this for 2 or 3 weeks. I told her, that I would politely speak with this lady to get her to stop this practice. But every time, I tried to bring the subject up, I just chickened out. Finally after having enough, my wife politely brought the subject up with her. I was not present, but she assured me that she chose her words carefully and tried to be as polite as possible. The translation of a cut of what transpired is that my wife mentioned to her that it was somewhat ugly and we should do all that we could do to keep the neighborhood looking nice. This lady responded that her daughter also said that it was ugly and that she shouldn't do it. So great, my wife is on the same page with this lady's daughter. (It's also worth mentioning that the word "ugly" in this case might be better translated as "not so nice".)

That evening, I was playing soccer with my kids in the street. This lady left her house probably to get something from the grocery store around the corner. I waved, but she was obviously very bothered and ignored me. When she got back, she called me over. Her story and the story that my wife had of their conversation were very very different. Amazing. In her story, my wife used very strong words and was very belittling of her.

So what to do? I assured her of our genuine aspirations to maintain peace with her and her family and at the same time I firmly sided with my wife's stance of keeping the neighborhood looking nice as well as questioning whether she used "feo" or "HOR-I-BLE!!!" ("ugly" or "HORRIBLE!!!").

Lesson Learned: For me, this was a very eye opening culture experience. This lady would've rather that we gossiped about her behind back, even going as far as posting this on the internet than have us confront her face-to-face to complain about an issue that we had with her. I'm over 35 years old and I never quit learning. This one experience helped shed light on a lot of things for me of which I will not get into here.

So, what happened? Well, she keeps putting her clothes out there on the fence of that vacant lot. Not that much now, but in defiance she still does it.

As for me, the adolescent in me thinks its kind of funny and does not run out of ideas of what to do about this. Unfortunately, I haven't acted out on any of those childish prank ideas that he keeps coming up with, yet. I think its the mature adult in me that's keeping that adolescent in check. But, wait! I didn't tell you, that there's an old man in me who's in his late 60s who agrees with that adolescent; so its hard to say how this is going to play out.

I know everybody hates those neighborhood associations micromanaging people and lording power over folks; but we sure could use one here!

You are responsible for yourself

Breaking News from Drudge:

There's some infighting going on, on the Democrat side. Big deal. That's just how it is on any side.

Jesse Jackson said something stupid concerning Obama that was meant for private but got public.

Here's a clip of what bothered me the most about what he said (copied straight from drudgereport.com):

_My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.

This statement exposes the heart of the problem with Democrats. What bothers me about his statement is his point of view. He's implying that poor decisions with the government led to folks being irresponsible. That's probably the key problem with the Democratic party: They look to government to take care of them instead of them taking care of themselves.

I can rephrase this statement: Democrats believe with absolute conviction that the government must take care of the people.

Let me go one step farther: so much so, the government must take care of the people at the expense of other people.

When the government doesn't "take care of someone" that someone has an excuse to be irresponsible.

Lets exam this premise, there are all kinds of problems with Democrat thinking.

1. They don't believe in individual responsibility but they believe that the government must take care of individuals.
2. If someone has it together and is responsible, the Democrats want to punish that person by taking away the fruits of his labor and give them to someone else who is irresponsible.

Why can they not see that this is truly absurd, backwards thinking?

Some folks mistakenly think that Democrats help people. Democrats don't help anybody. They enslave people with their socialist programs; extinguishing any flame of ambition that their new found slaves once had. While doing this, they are robbing from producers in our society, likewise throwing water on this metaphorical flame of ambition.

My advice to Jesse Jackson, Obama and other Democrats is to stop looking to government for the solutions to your problems. Doing so, only encourages government to try to solve your problems, which in the long run creates even BIGGER problems for everybody.