What's up?

Gas $3.50 a gallon?

My Joy

This is my Prince & my Princess! Justin and Kaitlyn overwhelm me with emotion. They bring a smile to my face everyday.
God is teaching me a lot about his will of decree. Seeing Justin dealing with absent seizures at a young age has been really hard. I really wanted to fight God on this. I shared with my Sunday school class that I felted betrayed or ripped off. I have been taught that if you love the Lord God with all your heart he will make me happy. He will make me (my family) safe. Life will be good. This was a shake up of that teaching.

More on that later. These two and my wife are my joy... in the good and the bad.

Tahoe

This is a poor pic. It was taken from my iPaq but is a memorial of July 4th getting ready for fireworks. This was the cabin weekend with the Anderson's. Our kids play so well together it is really a joy to spend time with them.

Penny Wise and a Pound Follish

Tough day today. Submitting to authority is a pain. I wish I could "just do it!" I met with some friends tonight for Bible study. It was a bit weird. As we were studying Eph. 4:25-32 the leader of the group started asking if anyone had bitterness against anyone else in the group. It was very uncomfortable.

But as I reflected on the event later, I believe the leader's heart is in the right place. But I feel if we are walking in the Spirit and our life is being led by scriptures such as "setting our eyes and Jesus"- then we should "forget what lies behind and press on or strain forward.
Do we need to pick the junk off the ground (shouldn't it have been “left behind”) and deal with it again?
Sometimes? Maybe every once in a great while? But that felt like emotional gobbly-gook. It feels like a type of self-center maneuver to feel-goodism.

One shouldn't feel like they are walking on egg shells when around brothers and sisters in Christ (nor should one use our brothers and/or sisters as door mats). As Jesus said in Matt. 5:37: “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.”

Life is too short to tip toe around or trying to walk on egg shells with out breaking them. We live in a time when God has so much grace and mercy and forgiveness that we should also imitate the grace, mercy and forgiveness to each other (7 times 77?).

Philippians 3:7-16

Yet whatever gains I had these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.

More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.

Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you.

Only let us hold fast to what we have attained.

Live life with passion to what your heart desires!

Beauortic? That is a work a co-worker and I can up with.

Beau crate+idiotic+neurotic= Beauortic