I'm back

That's all I wanted to say right now. Oh, and I went deep sea fishing, and everyone in the boat caught a fish but me. I've still never caught a fish. Just as a sad side note, everyone else in the boat had all caught numerous fish before. I'm not quite sure what God is trying to prove with all this....

Yay! I win!

I think that I should win an award for being the most-improved blogger. Yay, me! I'm so happy!

By the way, just an update, I gave up after 2.5 hours. Talked to them this morning - one lady explained that they were having problems with one of their cues, and that I probably just got caught up in the eternal cycle and they weren't able to retrieve my call. She said if I ever wait more than 15 minutes, hang up and call again.

Hopefully I won't have to. If I'm lucky, I will have this all resolved by the end of the day. If not, I'll just have to wait until after my holidays.

2 hours and counting

Well, so far I have been on hold with hp (hewlitt-packard) for 2 hours, 1 minuted, 25 seconds. Fortunately I have been able to put it on speakerphone and do other stuff while I'm on hold. Still, once I'm done this and my lunch, I'll be calling them on my cell phone and getting through to someone directly (you talk to someone personally in the first minute or so). Good thing I'm not the yelling type.

On the other hand, they keep listing all the problems that you may be having with your windows based computer (constantly shutting down, crashing, etc). and that they can fix it. Sounds like a giant Mac add to me! :D

Darrian is 4

Yup. Darrian's birthday today. How cool/weird is that?

Four days until we leave for Cuba. It is so difficult to concentrate on work when you're thinking about vacation. Fortunately it's a relatively light week this week.

Terra's going to be a travel agent. If only we can figure out what the government needs for licensing. And a few (like, about 30) other details.

Lawyers are expensive. $250.00 an hour. I should charge that.

Doo dee doo dee doo.

Why, oh why?

Why does life work in fits and spurts? This week has been incredibly, ridiculously busy. I shouldn't even be writing on here (but I am anyway). And next week looks absolutely lazy. Sometimes it would be nice if it was just all fairly steady - not too busy, not too quiet. I guess this adds some excitement and adrenaline to things, though.

This week I've been working through a devotional booklet, and it's been focusing a lot on how we encourage and praise the people around us, building them up, appreciating them and loving them in that way. It's not an unusual topic, but I've found it's been kind of neat to think about it continually, every day in the week, and just drive the point home. It becomes more than just a quick thought that way, but really something that can be dwelt on. Who is there in your life that you really need to encourage and affirm?

Nobody commented last week. Feeling kind of rejected. :D

Learning

So what's been my big discovery of the week? Well, I'm preaching this week on how Christ sustains all things (see Colossians 1:17-18, Hebrews 1:3a), and it has been sort of neat. I was looking at one paper (research), and it discussed how natural laws are God's normal ways of governing life, and that miracles are best thought of as God doing something unusual for a particular purpose. I thought that was a good way of looking at it. We tend to view the natural laws as the foundation of our world, but really it is God, through Christ, who sustains our world. The natural laws themselves are constantly maintained by Christ. And since he maintains them constantly, setting them aside, or doing something different (miracles) for a moment wouldn't be a big stretch or difficulty.

Fundamentally, it means that God is not a distant God who is "up there" somewhere and occasionally reaches into our world, but rather one who is very present, and active, in our everyday lives. What difference does that make to our understanding of God, or to our faith in his ability to answer prayers or do miracles?

On a completely different note, I just watched Kung Fu Panda last night. What a great movie! The trailers actually didn't look that interesting to me, but the movie itself was way better than my expectations.