Avoiding Evil

I took Kendall to school last night. She goes to school at Missouri Baptist University and on Monday nights she has to go to the main campus. Sometimes I drive her up there so that she doesn’t have to go by herself and I don’t really trust her car all that much. After dropping her off at school I decided to go over to Chesterfield Mall to walk around. After walking around the mall and buying a couple books I came back out to the parking lot to get into my car and guess what… no car. I walked up and down the rows pushing my lock and panic button trying to locate my car, but I never found it. After walking around the same parking lot several times I went up to the door of the mall and peered into it trying to remember if I came out the right door. It was official, this was the right place, this was the right parking lot, and my car was missing.

My stomach was turning, my head spinning, and all I could think of was the horrible experience that I went through the last time my car was stolen. How could this happen again. After getting sick and beginning to sweat I flagged down a security officer who was patrolling the parking lot. I told him that I couldn’t find my car and that I know I had parked it in this parking lot. I told him I was driving my new ‘05 Black Chevy Cobalt and then I hopped in the truck while we searched the parking lot. He told me the steps we needed to take before we called the police. This whole time I am praying that I just missed it, or that someone simply “moved” it to another location. Kendall was at school, I was stuck over at the mall with no car, and it would be a good hour or more before anyone could get up there to pick us up. I knew that I had left a key in the glove box of my car and I then wondered if I had locked it. Somehow in my head I remembered locking my car and looking back at it as I went into the mall to make sure the lights flashed to tell me it was locked. I knew for sure that I had parked in that parking lot and that I had locked the car. Someone had to have broken in and stolen it.

The security officer drove me around to each of the parking lots at the mall. He said we had to make sure it wasn’t on the property anywhere and so we went up row after row after row and the whole time I pushed the button on my remote to see if my car would honk or something. He continued to ask what the car looked like, where I came out, where I parked, and he said that this was one of the safest places to leave a car because they have not had a care stolen from their lot in years (which is the same thing The Muny told me). I felt so sick and I couldn’t believe this was happening to me again and then suddenly like a mighty wind rushing across me I had a small moment of remembrance flow back into my brain and I realized something. Are you sitting down? I realized that I drove Kendall’s car to St. Louis, not my car. I had been looking for a black Cobalt and I showed up in a red Caviler.

After I had blood flow back in my brain and I started to calm down I told the security officer what had happened, and he laughed a little bit and said that he had done that several times before as well and that basically his job was to help people find their cars. I was a bit embarrassed as he drove me back to the area that I had parked and lo and behold there it sat, the red Caviler.

{Posted by my wife, who is truly a blessing!}

Blessing. Webster’s Dictionary defines this word as “something promoting or contributing to happiness, well-being, or prosperity”. I was having a discussion with several people this morning at work about blessings and what the cost is with regard to these blessings. We were really discussing relationships with others and what the cost of these relationships often is. The male in the group, we’ll call him Mr. G, said that he knows a lot of women who think that relationships should be roses and candy all the time and that with the first sign of conflict, their world comes to an end. As much as I wanted to disagree with that statement, how true it is! Rather than realizing the immense and wonderful blessings we have in front of us, we have to find all the faults and then discount the whole situation as a loss. I, personally, believe that this is the reason for many divorces. Instead of acknowledging the blessings in life and being grateful for them, we choose to complain about the faults with the things we’re given.

Mary Ann Center, our church’s financial secretary and one of my mentors, said today, “With every true blessing, there is a sacrifice.” How true this statement is! With every relationship we enter, with every single thing God gives us, we must sacrifice something. Even in our Christian walk, we are called to make an ultimate sacrifice: giving up our lives to follow Christ. We must surrender our own selfish desires in order to receive His grace and to truly follow His call on our lives. In every relationship we enter, whether a dating relationship, a marriage, a friendship, we are called to make sacrifices, to put that other person (or people) before ourselves. If we want to see our relationships grow to the fullest measure, we must be willing to give, give, give.

Blessings are such an important and gratifying part of life, but we must realize that with every blessing comes a cost, and we must be willing to pay that price. Next time that argument breaks out with a loved one, or an angry word is spoken, don’t lose sight of the blessing….know that you TRULY have been blessed with an irreplaceable gift!

Kendall

I’ve been searching for software that would allow me to organize and keep a record of my entire book collection and library. Being in ministry and seminary I have collected a large amount of books and my collection is getting out of hand. I don’t know what I’ve read, what I haven’t read, and half the time I don’t even know where certain books are. I needed a software that would allow me to just scan the BarCode of the book and have it record it. I was looking for a simple, cheap program to do this task, but I found a program that has become a whole lot more than I was expecting. The Delicious Library from Delicious Monster is a mac based library organizing software that organizes your book, DVD, and CD collection. It lists information about them, lists a current value compared to the retail price, and allows you to add your own notes. You can check off whether you have read the book, list its condition, put it up for sale, or simply organize or list your items by genre, alphabetical order, price, or any other of the many options. Not only that, you can use an iSight as a BarCode scanner so that you simply run your iSight over the BarCode on the book or movie and it searches an internet database until it finds what it is looking for and then adds both the information and the picture of your item to the library. For only $39.00 you can do all of this and needless to say it has impressed my socks off.

I’ve ordered an iSight, but I didn’t want to wait to start adding books, so I’ve just been typing in the ISBN number which also works just as well. This is going to allow me to have a database of all my books, DVD’s, and CD’s and it will help me keep a record of where they are or who’s borrowed what, show me what I’ve read and haven’t read, and it will even allow me to rate my items with a 5 star system. Best of all, it is a system that will show what each book is worth and so in case of a fire or something else that might destroy my collection, I will have printouts that show the retail value of my book collection and what the whole collection was worth. The latest version allows you to sink your Delicious Library information to your iPod for safe keeping and so that you have a portable list of your current library. All together this is an excellent program that I recommend to anyone looking to organize their library.

{Posted By My Wife}

In the grand scheme of life, what is most important? The typical Sunday School type answer, of course, is to serve God, to bring glory to Him in every aspect of daily living. A lot of words for someone who is not familiar with the Bible or with Christianity, as a whole. I believe, that within that large purpose, relationships are the most important. Without good, solid relationships, it is hard to reach someone for the cause of Christ. It is our job, our calling, if you will, to love others. We must build friendships with them and make them feel worthwhile and loved if we are ever going to make a difference in their lives. Relationships must be built within the body of Christ as well. We must get into the habit of loving others unconditionally, often having to forgive the most ugly words spoken or hurtful actions taken, in order to serve Christ. This is especially true of dating relationships, as well.

Forgiveness is an interesting concept to me, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot, lately. The ultimate in forgiveness, of course, was Christ, who suffered and died a horrible death so that we could live eternally with Him, rather than spending that time in eternal suffering. It’s funny, the closer you get to someone, the more it hurts when something goes wrong within the relationship. This is true of friends, family, and those closest to you. It seems such an easy thing to offer an “I’m sorry” but is that really enough? Does that take back the hurtful things that have been said? Not in this lifetime. Things can be forgiven, but it is in our human nature not to forget. This is why we must strive, daily, to make the choice to use only kind words, only words that will help each other grow and develop both in Christian maturity, and life. Jim Huitt preached a sermon a while ago that was about marriage and he shared with us that it’s silly to just offer an “I’m sorry” right after the offense occurs, desiring the other person to just forgive, right then. He said that lessens the hurt, and the situation may repeat itself, only next time, it will be worse.

We must choose to love one another, to serve one another diligently, giving up our own selfish desires for the well-being of others. We must harness our tongues and speak only in love, rather than lash out in anger or reproach. The offended, however, must forgive in love, and never bring up the past in a disagreement. Once an offense is forgiven, the slate is clean and, although the offense may not be forgotten in the mind of either party, it must never be brought up again. Let’s love and encourage one another, rather than tearing each other down.

Let no unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs.
Ephesians 4:29

Kendall

Lets take a small moment out of the day to laugh at the temper tantrums of rich men:

Ballmer’s threat last November was recounted in a sworn declaration by a former Microsoft engineer, Mark Lucovsky, who said he met with Microsoft’s chief executive 10 months ago to discuss his decision to leave the company after six years.

After learning Lucovsky was leaving to take a job at Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and hurled it across his office, according to the declaration.

“I’m going to bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again,” the declaration quotes Ballmer. “I’m going to kill Google.”

This is just a small portion of the rivalry building between Microsoft and Google. It all started with Kai Fu-Lee who left Microsoft to start a Google extension in China and the lawsuit that followed. This little tantrum happened when Lucovsky also announced his decision to leave Microsoft and go to work with Google. Ballmer claims that Lucovsky’s recollection of the events is a “gross exaggeration” and he says that he was simply disappointed and urged him to change his mind. I wonder if he showed his disappointment by dropping the f-bomb and threatening Google and then urged Lucovsky not to leave by throwing a chair across the room? What do you think?

What does all this matter? It doesn’t. I have almost completely made the switch from Microsoft to Apple. The Microsoft PC I use now is at work and that will soon be changing as well. I just thought it was funny to see the rivalry between multi-million dollar companies who have more money than they know what to do with and yet throw the biggest fits known to man at the slightest thought that they might lose a little money. This is a sad state of affairs.

We live in a messed up world. This is the same world that places more value on sports and entertainment than on the education of our children, as seen by the millions of dollars we pay to baseball players and the little pocket change we throw at people who give their lives to educate the children of America. If that isn’t a messed up priority, I don’t know what is…