Warning: navel gazing.

Sometimes I don’t think I am growing.

When I work with the youth on Wednesday nights, the youth pastor always asks for testimonies, answers to prayer, and what the Lord is doing in your life. I have a testimony, and I see answers to prayer, and blessings every day! But I never “feel a way the Lord is working in my life”.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter; feelings are just feelings. But often I wonder about it. I hear so many people say “you should be able to look look back on your life a decade/year/month/etc. ago and see that you are holier/closer to Christ now” and I never seem to.

Right now I’m reading through Jeremiah. Back in college we had a class in which reading through the entire Bible was required – so I did it as fast as humanly possible. So this time I’m trying to read Jeremiah with “actual thought and understanding”. I read it through in KJV, and now I am reading it through with a Wycliffe Bible Commentary. Seeing each phrase of Jeremiah with an explanation makes it easier to understand (although reading it in “anything other than KJV” would also make it easier to understand – duly noted). Next I will read it again with my NIV Life Application Bible, for a different take. Finally I think I will try to write it over “in my own words”. This is the biggest “self motivated” Bible study I have done for a decade, to my shame. 

Everyone says “learning about the Bible/God is not the same thing as getting to know God himself” but, to quote a song, ”you can’t stand on the promises if you don’t know what they are”. So I will study God’s love letter to us, to learn about Him – there has to be a balance there.

I love all forms of video games & geekery, and sometimes it does bother me when I think how easy it is to spend an hour on a game and so hard it is to spend fifteen minutes in prayer. [Asking "WWJD" before killing an orc is not the same as "WWJD" before spending the hours on the game. ]

And which has more eternal value?

I have no happy ending to this post. Just my $.02 and exposed inner conflict, same as any other Christian. It is worth it to ponder this hard question.

This was from the 4th of July. It really didn’t taste bad, but the presentation…

This instantly reminds me of James Lileks great books on “Regrettable Food” such as this one. (Amazon link )

But you can tool around for a long time on his website, looking at his goofy collection of… things… in the “Institue of Official Cheer”: http://lileks.com/institute/index.html

I am sorry I haven’t been updating this blog!

Here is a picture of something I didn’t finish yet, just to prove I am not sitting here playing Plants vs. Zombies 24×7.  The “artfully arranged desk clutter” probably reveals more of my personality than I want it to.

Two half-way-painted birds.

Yesterday I had a piece of foil on my dinner. I like to recycle the used (clean) foil to use as armature for clay creatures, so I went upstairs to stick the foil in the attic where I keep it. And as I went into the attic, in the dark, and stubbed my toe hard on the cedar chest. I could tell pretty quick that something was wrong, so I went to the emergency room. X-rays easily confirmed that it was broken.

Ouch.

So I’m home from work now, with an appointment to see a doctor later. We’ll know more then, but the ER doctor said I’d need to wear an ugly cast-type-shoe-thing for about four weeks.

I told everyone I was going to blog about Twitter apps, but I was interrupted by chocolate.

I don’t know if anyone else has done this and coined the phrase but I was bored, and had adorably star shaped marshmallows, and decided I would make S’mores. But since I had no graham crackers, I used an Oreo. It turned out to be made of awesome.

First, I had these little cute star shaped red, white & blue marshmallows. Through trial and error I found that a good “S’moreo” only needs one.

Are they not cute?

Second, I put a chunk of Hershey’s milk chocolate, with a star-marshmallow, into a properly opened Oreo chocolate sandwich cookie. By “properly opened” I mean you must twist it so that half the cream is on either side. I just like it that way best. I know countless millions have heaped shame on me for this.

Properly Loaded Oreo

Put the S’moreo into the microwave on High for about 10 seconds, or until the marshmallow FWOOMPs into a poof. (To use a technical term.)

FWOOMP!

Jam the top half of the cookie on, and eat it all in one bite so it doesn’t glop tasty ooze all over you.

Yum-o.

 Repeat!

And I’ll post about the Twitter apps soon.

This past Saturday was the Hebron Youth Conference for 2009, entirely put together by the associate pastor of my church. He was simultaneously going through a rough spot in his family, so I am awestruck that he put so much time and effort into this as well. God definitely blessed his efforts!

I went as a chaperone, for the youth from my church. The theme was Proverbs 4:23 “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” The main point being that we, as Christians, are to be holy – which does not mean “off in a monastery” but it does mean “set apart”. We need to keep out of the grime and sin of the world and culture. It’s a hard thing to do, but when the fruits God promises are things like love, joy, peace, etc. it does seem like there are good rewards. (And it is your “reasonable service.”)

I am not going to go over every thing every speaker said, but I will point out a few things that struck me as interesting takes. When you have been listening to sermons since birth sometimes it is amazing and refreshing to hear something that seems new.

• Holiness is supposed to be as desirable and enjoyable as a sunny day vs. a cloudy rainy dark day.
• We are not to “pursue victory” and be “defeated by sin” – that puts all the emphasis on US. In reality we are to realize that sin isn’t just a “struggle” within us; when we sin, we mar God’s reputation, as God’s children, and show the world that being a Christian doesn’t make us any different. That should be one of the motivations not to do it. And so it isn’t a victory/defeat issue, it is a “you are being disobedient” issue.
• Sometimes our ATTITUDE is what determines whether a thing is beneficial to us or not.
• When you have daily devotions, the object of your devotion is God. Even your time of prayer should focus on God and not just on “God help me X, Y, Z”
• Keep having daily devotions even if you have no desire; the desire will come later.
• Since the Bible is inspired, when you open it, by definition you take the the very breath of God!

Penultimately, I want to add a list of “Five things we want the Lord Jesus to be able to say to us if the Rapture should occur today” – as listed by Dr. Michael Peck. (I was even more struck by these since I knew the two other chaperones sitting next to me were going through such family trials that these were heart-wrenchingly relevant - and still nodding and amen-ing along with this. I was humbled and awed.)

1. You obeyed Me even when you didn’t understand why. (Mt 4:18-20)
2. You trusted Me even when it was hard (Ps 125:1)
3. You worshipped Me even when your heart was breaking (Job 1,2)
4. You loved Me even when others walked away (Jn 14:15)
5. You accepted My will even when it was not what you would have personally chosen (Ps 40:8, Ps 143:10)

Finally, in the border of my notes during the sermons I ended up with this little character. I drew her once during each message, and so this was message #5, the final version. (We did have a 6th sermon but I didn’t draw her again.)

Oodle

I have been hammered at work this week, and also a little flustered at home. The medicine I take is on backorder! Even the doctor told me this a couple of weeks ago, and now that I went to the pharmacy I found out it’s true. Isn’t that odd? I mean… this medicine is important – shouldn’t more than one company produce it? Especially since I think it’s a generic. Weird.

Also the quest to find copper sheet continues. Home Depot (or at least the one I tried) says they don’t carry it. So I did buy some copper paint (made of ‘liquified copper particles’ so it should look authentic). I will eventually have to go back to that first craft store, but it’s in an inconvenient location.

Finally, here is a bit of old art I just dredged up. It is really from 2005, don’t tell. But I hadn’t posted the silly thing yet so I’ll sneak it into here. It’s a lot like the Garjubble. My style hasn’t changed very much. Which is not necessarily bad, but I do always say I should work at doing more life sketching.

Behold the Thunderous Ossiput

For all of January I was very good about posting in here about three times a week. This has fallen apart in February. That’s why I don’t think I would ever be able to do a consistent podcast – I am poor with this, let alone something that requires so much editing.

Anyway I hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day, and a wonderful Monster Day (Feb. 16, a day where you buy up leftover Valentine’s candy, and get friends over to watch crummy B-grade Monster movies, and draw monsters if you are of the artistic bent.) Not my idea (though I would take credit). I heard of this at Ninjahinjinx ( http://ninjahijinx.livejournal.com/ )

I did NOT have a wonderful Valentine’s day. My dad went into the hospital last Friday, and came home Sunday afternoon. Friday evening all the youth of the church (and the youth leaders) gave a “Parents’ Night Out” – where we took all the kids in the church from 0 to 6th grade, and took care of them from 5:30 until 9:00 pm, giving the parents a nice evening off.

So in the hospital I hung out with my folks, drank free coffee, and watched Notting Hill and several episodes of Man vs. Wild. Then Tuesday I went to the International House of Johnson for Game Night, where we developed our Spirit of the Century characters (this is going to be so fun!). I wasn’t feeling very good, and mostly attributed it to heartburn, but in the night I felt worse even after some medication. So Wednesday I went to the ER myself. They gave me some Ativan so I slept the rest of the day. (The guy who hooked up my monitor looked something like Cmaaarrr.)

They discovered that my veins are incredibly hard to find. This was the worst part of the whole ordeal.

Today I’m back at work as usual.

Well, actually there was a horrible slick of ice across the highway (I should have noticed the pile of cars on either side of the road and people waving their arms frantically at me) that nearly gave me a heart attack (but I have Blizzak snow tires, and they are the best), so it took an extra hour to get here.

Still… fairly usual.