May God bless you

From Craig Groeschel:

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

God bless me and your church.

Proverbs 17

Lots of nuggets of wisdom today in Proverbs 17.

This one stings right to the heart:

5 Whoever mocks poor people insults their Creator; gloating over misfortune is a punishable crime.

I know there have been times I’ve laughed or made fun of people different than me. It’s easy to do. It’s easy to try and make yourself look better at the expense of others.

I talked with a friend recently about our Junior High days. He said that he was at the bottom of the social ladder and always felt tormented, was beat up and ridiculed because he was different. I admitted that deep down I was just like him but I fought and clawed to keep up my appearance and to find someone who was “worse than me” to keep the attention away from me. I would point out the flaws of others just so my own flaws wouldn’t be picked on and pointed out in the “all important” social hierarchy of things.

Yet as this verse says, when we make fun of the creation – aren’t we really making fun of the creator?

If you were to make a painting or a sculpture and I saw it and started laughing and saying, “Oh that’s ridiculous. I can’t believe you that.” You’d take that pretty personally. After all it’s not just a painting, it’s a painting you made. You spent your time creating it. It only makes since then that if we mock the poor (financially, physically, mentally or others) we’re simply insulting the Creator Himself. Ouch. Makes me really want to examine my thoughts and comments throughout the day a little closer and fill my mind and heart with Godly things instead.

Weekend activities

a. Laurie took me shopping Friday night for a “huge sale” at Dillards
b. Bought 3 new shirts – didn’t think I could pull them all off – 2 of them are Larges – I don’t know when the last time I wore a large shirt was
c. We enjoyed dinner at El Fenix
d. Followed by miniature golf at Celebration Station
e. Tried a Geocache that was apparently disabled before we went looking for it – so we spent 15-20 minutes looking for nothing
f. Delivered a wedding gift to friends – only 3 or 4 months late 😉
g. Went and looked at a home Saturday morning – wasn’t too impressed
h. Laurie and I played disk golf on Saturday with James, Juston, Ben and Andrew
i. I won
j. Went to Grapefest Satuday night with Tim and Kara
k. Was disappointed that you have to pay for everything even after paying an $8 entry fee
l. Went to church this morning – great message on self-control by Brian
m. Went to Richard and Amber’s house for a birthday BBQ/Lunch for Amber
n. Went and looked at a home suggested by a realtor
o. Decided to check the prices on a new home
p. Signed a contract on the new home
q. Now I’m watching Anchorman while Laurie talks to her mom on the phone
r. Pretty uneventful weekend 😉

New House


New House
Originally uploaded by laurie416.

So… we took a big step of faith today and put a contract on a new home in Red Oak. Three bedroom and two bath. Very nice. We’re hoping our loan goes through and we’ll move in rather quickly.
I’ll let you know more when we actually close things out.
But for now – you’re more than welcome to see the photos on Laurie’s Flickr page.

Had to share this one

President Bush and the Pope are fishing in the middle of a lake in Rome. Suddenly a gush of wind blows the Pope’s hat into the water. President Bush quickly jumps up, steps out of the boat and walks on to the water to retrieve the Pope’s hat. The next day the newspapers and TV commentators report – ‘Bush can’t swim!’

Google moon goes live

Google Moon is live now – and if you can figure out a way to land a private spacecraft on that big ball of cheese – Google will pony up $30 million.
From the Google blog:

Great things can happen when you reach for the stars. That’s why we’re thrilled to be sponsoring the Lunar X-PRIZE, which will award a total of $30 million to teams competing around the world to land privately funded spacecraft on the Moon.
Why does Google love space? Well, for one thing, we just think it’s cool. More seriously, space exploration has a remarkable history of producing technological breakthroughs, from ablative heat shields and asteroid mining to invisible braces and Tang; the X-PRIZE, too, could lead to important developments in robotic space exploration, a whole host of new space-age materials, precision landing control technology, and who knows what else.
Finally, we hope the contest will help renew public interest in fields like math, engineering and computer science, especially among the young people on whom we’ll all be depending to tackle tomorrow’s technical challenges, whether they’re on the web or among the stars.

So start getting out your schematics, and plans and lets see who can make it to the moon first.