I do not use etrade, but there commercials are swell.

Shankapotomus

Laughing

Read this post from the wife’s blog.

I sometimes find myself struggling to excersise patience with the kids.  It’s usually about that time that a little thought creeps into my head.  It’s God reminding me how exceedingly patient He is with me.  Wow!  He’s right, He’s always right. 

I look back on my life and think how many times has He wanted to reach down from Heavern and flick me in the back of the head with his majestic finger only to restrain.  Only to exercise patience.

Life is chaotic, work is chaotic and sometimes when I come home, home is chaotic.  That’s what happens when you have a 7 year old girl, a 4 year old boy and a dog that has severe ADD.  So I’ve started doing a little mental exercise when I sense that impatient feeling starting to rise within me.  I say a quick prayer and remind myself that it’s for and because of Him (God) and for them (the wife, the son and the daughter…alright and the dog) that I live and strive and give.

This isn’t advice, could be encouragement, but I think it’s just me thinking out loud.  Do with this life lesson what you will.

Thanks for listening….uh…I mean reading.

Read this post from my friend and fellow blogger Tom Davis.

$1.50, the difference between food or starvation, the difference between life and death.  What’s the difference?  I am, you are. 

$1.50 could feed an orphan in Swaziland a basic meal (corn mush) 5 days a week.  Truth, I could rummage around my house and find $1.50.  Truth, you could too.  Truth, $1.50 is the minimum and our God is not about the minimum.  I can do more than $1.50 and so can you.  Our wonderful country is blessed beyond measure.  Our wonderful country, alone, has the resources to wipe out poverty and wipe out hunger.  What our wonderful country needs, action. 

So here’s my challenge to you and my challenge to myself.  It’s time to act. Look up the word act, in the 2nd definition you’ll find it means the state of real existence rather than possibility.  

Starving orphans are a real existence.  You doing something about it…a real existence or a possibility?

Music:

U2::a tribute to 9/11

Coldplay

Kent::Brilliant in English or their native tongue

Leeland

 Causes

The Solution

One

5 For 50

Fields of the Fatherless::My friend Tom Davis

When did being busy become a badge of honor in our society.  Ask somebody how they’ve been and many times the response is “busy.”  Professionally speaking, it’s about 99% of the time.  As if busy is some sort of indicator of success, of significance, or of importance.  Why do we desire busy.  Is busy a way of life or is busy a way to escape the current life one is living?  Are we busy because we truly find fulfillment in that life or are we busy because we have to support the lifestyle we’ve chosen?  Or could it be we’re busy because we’ve bought the lie.   

The lie tells us to be happy, to find fulfillment, you have to wear certain clothes, to drive an SUV, to live in a big house in the best neighborhood, and you must have a flat screen TV (wall mounted if you want stand out).  All lies!  We live life at full speed because if we don’t, we can’t afford our stuff.  Don’t agree?  Then why has the average size of homes in America increased, when the average size of the family has decreased?  Simple, our stuff.  It’s like we live to maintain our stuff rather than enjoy our stuff.  Rather than to enjoy life.        

I’m out.

I don’t want busy.  I don’t need things.  I’ve had them and didn’t find fulfillment, only debt.  We’re just now crawling out of a hole dug when my wife got laid off in the Fall of 2003.  It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t fun, and on countless occasions I couldn’t imagine we’d ever escape.  By the grace of God, we can see a clearing on horizon.  We’re close to being out of the hole.  Looking back, I wouldn’t change one moment of the past 4 years.  If the wife and I went through this so that the daughter and the son won’t have to, then every second was worth it.  So you can have your stuff, and mine too.  We’ll never build our lives around stuff.  I don’t care about being important, I don’t’ need to be significant, and I don’t have an interest in being successful (the way the world defines success).  So if not busy, then what?  If not stuff, then what?  If not importance, then what?  If not significance, then what?  If not success, then what?  

Him.
 
I want Him.  I want to know Him.  Not of Him, but to truly know the heart of the Father.  I want to drink deep the things of God. To pursue Him with a fervor, an intensity, and a relentless hunger.  I’m desperate.  I want to run hard after the Father.  Will I ever catch Him?  Can we ever catch Him?  Could it be that when we pursue Him with an unquenchable thirst, He catches us?  To be honest, I have no clue.  I’m just going to run, to pursue.    

The wife and I have this desire to find simplicity, to find community, to slow down and experience life instead or survive it.  The path to all of that starts with Him.  I’m not naïve enough to think that knowing Him will erase the obstacles or remove the challenges.  I do believe that the size of the obstacles and the magnitude of the challenges are diminished when the One that ordained them, the one that allowed them to happen, is the One that will walk with you through it.

He’s walked with us.

I feel the need to clarify that I’m not saying that stuff is bad.  If you can afford stuff, have it.  But isn’t something off when people spend hundreds of dollars to put clothes on a dog or to put them in a fancy pink carrier when children all over the world are dying because of hunger or dying of sicknesses that we don’t even scoff at.  Isn’t something off when our dogs in America eat better and live better than children all over the world.

Then again, this is not about you or your stuff.  It’s an attempt to put words to what He has stirred in my heart.  It’s about the Pellet family and our journey.

I stole this video from my friend Kenneth’s blog.  Watch this man have the defining moment of his life in front of Simon Cowell.

This majestic wonder will be minutes from my house.  I’m trying not to lust!

Bearfire Resort

The Details

Meet Dick and Rick Hoyt:

Video 1

Video 2

Bear Grylls is on another level.

His show, Man vs. Wild is too.

Each episode of Man vs. Wild finds Bear putting himself at death’s doorstep.  He puts himself in deadly situations like a hiker stranded in a desolate, icy mountain range in Alaska, a sweltering desert or a jungle.  He puts himself into the situation as they would be.  In the episode with the stranded hiker in the Alaskan mountains he had just the clothes on his back and a bag with a knife and water bottle in it.  He shows you what to do to survice in the most extemee situations. He caught a fish with a spear he made and ate it right there because with no way to build a fire that’s what one might have to do for survival.

The intense thing about this guy, He enjoy’s looking death in the face and laughing.

Trust me, you’ll like this show. 

So the daughter has a friend named Makayla and her family is into NASCAR.  The son and the daughter are into it because of the movie Cars.  The daughter and the wife had this conversation today:

The daughter:  Mom, I don’t like Tony Stewart anymore.

The wife:  Why not?

The daughter:  Well, Makayla says he whines after every race and she knows because she’s been to a race.

The wife:  Really.

The daughter:  So now my favorite driver is Dillon Hart Jr.

For the NASCAR challenged that should be Dale Earnhardt Jr.  Now you can laugh too.