Today I was thinking about some of the things that I love and I thought I would share it with all of you. Ready. Go!

 My favorite friend who is visiting KC right now is Kristine. She is freakin’ amazing and completely redecoarted my house. My kitchen is bright blue and my living room has a bright red accent wall and a sconce. You should come over sometime and see it.

My favorite (non-religious) book is called Art and Physics: parallel visions in space, time and light.

My favorite past-time that I get to do rarely is sit in my hammock and read.

My favorite shakespearean play is Henry V.

My favorite musical is Urinetown. Hee Hee.

My favorite word is sesquidpedalian. And also lugubrious. Oh and defenestrated.

My favorite 4 words in the bible are “but we see Jesus.” Hebrews 2:9 – I have been meditating on this passage for a while now. The verse before says that all things have been put into subjection under the Son. This one of those wonderful statements about the supremacy of Christ though the cross. But what I love most is the next phase. The writer of Hebrews takes a look around at life, the unuverse and everything and states that right now we don’t see everything put under his feet. It’s true. We don’t see the kingdom of God on earth, we don’t see every enemy conquored. Sin and death reign in our mortal bodies and we take a look at the society around us we see death, lust, greed and every vice exhalted. But despite this, we see Jesus. Just when confusion reaches its pinacle, the Son of God comes into view. We can lift our eyes from the chaos around us and have or gaze drawn to the day when Jesus will come to the earth and rule and reign and all things will be made right.

But we see Jesus. It’s so good. There is so much in just those four words.

Well…

 Ok. so I went on vacation and it was amazing. However, my intention of blogging everyday was thwarted by the fact that there was no wireless internet anywhere on the island. Which, of course, was completely unexpected for anyone who lives around IHOP. At the same time, it was wonderful because it gave me time to relax and spend time with my family. The best part was speding time with Jesus in My personal prayer room in Aruba. < contented sigh> It was wonderful.

Then I came home and had the busiest week of my life preparing for the Onething Youth Conference in KC. (Can you really work 20 hour days???)

Then I colapsed in a heap.

Then I went to My little brother’s wedding on 07.07.07. Which was wonderful.

 Now I’m back and decided that after 4 weeks of being on vacation it was time  to let people know that I am still alive. So there I’m still alive. And hopefully I will write more than once a month…

It seems my plans to become an avid blogger have been thwarted my my ridiculously busy life. The past two weeks have been some of the most schedule-crazy weeks in my IHOP career.

The main reason is because we have been shooting the promo video of the Onething conference. (You know, like the one with the running people last year…) except this year is going to be AMAZING! I would hate to give away the plot, but essentially, it’s about people with empty lives becoming people of Onething in the space of three minutes. It is awesome. So I have been doing that 8 hrs a day and then praying 6 hrs a night and running sound for Alisha’s team and working the Endtimes conference and setting up the JoCo conference and preparing for the Onething Youth conference etc, etc, etc.

So in the midst of all of this, how could I possibly find time to write?

Well, I didn’t. Which is why I haven’t written anything is so long. So how do I have time to write now?

I am on vacation! Where am I going?

Aruba. (My sister picked the location, I’m just along for the ride.) But I will certainly keep you guys updated on what my vacation looks like. I might even have time to sit down and write something worth reading!

Keep checking back. I will try to keep a travel journal and even post some pictures from the caribbean if I can figure out how!

I was going to post a very eloquent and thoughtful meditation from tonight in the prayer room. However, I didn’t get that far. All I have are some questions based on the word that have been running through me head. I thought I would share my questions and see if anyone has any answers.

So tonight I was reading the end of Deuteronomy. 27-32. As I am reading the blessings and curses for keeping the law, a thought hits me. “Why does God ask us to do things that he knows we can’t do?” This thought was very troubling to me. Especially because God askes me to do things for him all the time. In looking at the curses for disobedience (which turn out to be prophesies) it seems like God had no intention of ever having Israel complete the task that was set before them which was to “be holy as I am holy.” It is about righteousness.

Then I came to Deut 30:11-20. When I was reading this, my handy-dandy cross reference tool told me to go to Romans 10. This passage is talking about the difference between righteousness of the law and the righteousness of faith. So my questions are then, what does it mean to keep the law and what does it mean to be righteous? And in light of this how can I seek after righteousness?

 I don’t have the answers. These are the musings of my spirit in the night. But if anyone has clarity on the subject, please feel free to share!

Today I spent all day at FSM working on lights. What was I doing? Well, since we re-designed the lights in the Prayer Room, we now have a bunch of extra LEDlights just lying around. (You know, those really expensive bright colored lights that everyone used to complain about…) However in order to get them to work at FSM I had to make the right connector cables, set up the DMX universe and re-program the light board. Sure, that sounds easy enough, right?

 Well no.

First it took me an hour just to make the cable. Then we couldn’t get the second DMX universe to work. So we then unplugged all of the regular lights to get the LED’s to work. Success! That worked, but unfortunately we couldn’t get the stage lights and the LED’s to work at the same time. Frustration.

So we thought, hey, let’s try to re-program the board. Sounds great. After an hour of pushing every button we could find…we crashed the board and erased all of the light cues for service. Bummer. Oh and now the LED’s won’t work either. Nothing worked. Flagrant system error.

Yeah, it was bad.

Another hour of trouble shooting and we figured out how to get the board back up and to get the program running again. Hooray! But the LED’s still won’t work at the same time as the stage lights. But then after one more hour hour we finally figured out how to set up the second universe! All that remained was one last hour of re writing all of the light cues for service in the morning.

 All that to say, I spent 9 hours today working on lights and I think I broke more things than I fixed. It seemed extremely counter productive. At the end of the night all we could say was, “Wow, I’m glad we figured that out!” And then took everything apart again and put it back together the way it was before we started. However, sooner or later LED’s will be coming to a conference near you!