1. It’s great to sit in the Soak Zone when it’s 100+ outside. Crazy hot and you dry crazy fast.
2. Jake can grow 2″ really fast. Too fast. Time flies. Too fast.
3. Um, sea world “fun card” passes do not work on the sunday of labor day and memorial day weekend. Do not confuse this with being no good on the actual labor day or memorial day. Not that we figured that out the hard way, but if we would have come on Sunday night per se on Jake’s real birthday…. well we would have found out we would have to come back on Monday instead. Go figure.
4. Someone somewhere dreamed up a place where people would swim with killer whales and train them to work with people on a team. This is amazing to me, and for some strange reason, causes me to cry every time. I think it’s the vision thing. Maybe it’s the tribute to soldiers they do every time that sets me up to cry. But when I see this vision of someone realized in such a radical fashion, it always makes me want to see God do the amazing in my life. I know- it’s sappy. It’s just true. The stuff they do at this place with animals is mind boggling.
5. I love nice landscaping. I’ve said this before. I’m weird like this. I’d go to sea world to look at the gardens. This time, I actually thought to myself: “I think I would enjoy working on the grounds crew here.” I’m a dork.
6. I am blessed. Very very very very very very… yeah pretty much very blessed.

Well, my wife got a bug in her side over the past few weeks that said we needed to redo the downstairs bathroom. So, we did most of it on Saturday and finished the final touches on Sunday night.

Surprise, Surprise… but today I got this e-mail:

Congratulations, the iStockphoto administrators have determined that your images are commercially and technically ready for iStockphoto.com. Please begin uploading at your convenience.

So now I am officially a provider for istockphoto.com. I have been brewing on doing this for some time now, and with several people saying, something like, “you should sell your photos”. So, I decided to give it a whirl. So last week, I took 3 of my photos and uploaded them onto an application to be a provider for a professional graphics site that I buy pics off for ministry slides a lot. Maybe my photos will be on a billboard someday. How cool is that?

Here’s the 3 pics I applied with in low quality dpi…. no stealing now ya know :).

Not sure what has caused my usually family picture oriented blog to go so deeply theological lately… but I find myself thinking a lot based on a lot of stuff racking around in my brain.

I think evangelicalism- for lack of a better term- is in a funk these days. It seems like with the threat of subjective truth floating around, people are so scared of the unknown, or that it might threaten their establishment, that we spend a lot of time fortifying what we believe and why.

Maybe that’s what I’m doing. I don’t know.

But this post and this post both seem to express two sides of a Jesus loving coin. Maybe they know one another. Maybe they don’t. But both authors love Jesus. Both, I’m confident to say, are loving and serving the same Jesus and have been redeemed by the same Savior’s blood. One questions if being hated is evidence of the gospel. (side note: I once read an article about Billy Graham in the 90’s and how the author didn’t think Billy really was a believer because he was liked by too many non-christians). The other sees it as a badge of honor and a responsibility to express so as not to be unclear about the gospel.

I hope heaven is happier and more peaceful than the church. I sure hope there is not a baptist or charismatic or episcopalian or seeker sensitive or yatta yatta sectors. Won’t that be a relief. Sadly, I guess either Jesus will come back or we have to die before we’ll experience it.

In the meantime, the more I read of the Bible and the more I read of God-fearing, God-loving people disagreeing on similiar issues (both modern day and ancient), the more convinced I am that there are few and fewer hills I’ll really really die on. Yes the Bible is very clear in spots. Other places, are great to converse over… just really lousy places to build a fort.

I’m not claiming either post I linked to does one thing or the other…. I just think they make me think… and they probably are both right and wrong.

That’s the story of my life I think.