Excitement All Around

It's been a crazy week, and it's looking to be another one coming up. Of course, with Thanksgiving, we had family in town, and we all went to my grandparents house for a Thanksgiving dinner with my aunt and uncle and 3 cousins from Nashville. Speaking of the 3 cousins, they are all just about taller than me. The first is 6-3, the second is 5-10 or so, and the third is about 5-3 (and he's just 10 years old). I don't know what they're feeding them up there, but they're giants. My aunt and uncle on my mom's side from Missouri also came in for the weekend, so we got to spend some good time with them, and played lots of cards with my uncle as that is something we always do. Dustin was in for the weekend as well, so there was some good volleyball action going on as well. It was an excellent (tiring) weekend.

I don't know if it was out of stupidity or being tired or what, but I thought it would be fun to get up ridiculously early on Friday and go and see what specials we could pick up. There were a number of good deals that I saw in all the ads that I thought would be steals, so I suggested it to mom, and after talking for a bit, she got excited about the idea, so off we went at 4:30 in the morning to Knoxville to the shopping area that every guy would probably like to live in the middle of. You've got Dick's Sporting Goods, Best Buy, Lowe's, Circuit City, and 4 or 5 restaurants all in about a 300 yard circle. We just went and parked and then went to wherever we wanted to go. We waited outside Best Buy for about 45 minutes, which wasn't anywhere near as long as I thought that it would be, and managed to get some steals on electronic stuff and DVD's and such. Circuit City proved to be the longest wait of all, mostly because the store is small and so they couldn't have a lot of people in there at a time. I think I've gotten my share of this early morning shopping for a while...but who knows. Maybe next year it'll be the same. I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I'm camping out on Thursday afternoon to get in though...

This weekend will be my first trip back to Harding since Mandi graduated. We've decided that we'll be heading back to Armageddon II, mostly just to see friends and such, although I'm sure we'll end up playing some as well. I think I'm staying at Whitey's place with Stone and about 7 or 8 other guys that are going to be there for the weekend. It's going to be crazy. We're also going to a Keith Urban concert tomorrow night here in Knoxville, which should be good times. And a couple weeks from now I'll hopefully be in Charleston, SC if it works out with a place to stay and such. I'll need to get with Josh on that one...

The job hunt is going...slowly. I've had a little response from a recruiting company called Aerotek who has a few places that they are looking to place people that thought I would be a good fit for. They're currently compiling info on me to send to these companies and then reviewing it with them, and hopefully I'll be able to get an interview with one of them and maybe get myself a job here in a month or so. In the meantime, I've been looking for some type of temporary or part-time stuff, but nobody really is looking for any as far as I've found yet. Who knows. Hopefully something will come up soon in some fashion or other. I'd take rejection letters now just to know that it's actually being looked at. But oh well...I think this is probably the hardest part, just getting that first job. Once you've got some experience it surely can't be this hard. Oh well...it's back to the hunt for now.

Before Tomorrow Comes

The holiday season is here. In what is probably many people's favorite time of the year, we have almost a month where there are family get-togethers, an abundance of food, gift-giving and receiving, and just a general time of joy. It's funny, looking back at these times over the years that have passed, and just seeing how much has happened. At the same time, there's a lot that hasn't changed either. I just looked back over some of the things that I wrote about this time last year. Speaking of changes and everything...this time last year, I was finishing up some big projects for school, I was grading lab finals, I was playing in a frisbee tournament in Knoxville where Jake got his face busted, and Mandi was still at Harding. I am definitely looking forward to the end of this year though, and all of the things that will be happening over the next month.

Luke's last post on gratitude is an exceptional little piece on what we as Christians feel towards Christ for what he has done. I suggest you head over there and give it a read when you get the chance. Being as it is the Thanksgiving season, it is especially appropriate...which I figure is the reason that he wrote it. And there are many things to be thankful, and grateful, for, such as family, friends, and the many multitudes of blessings that we enjoy every day.

Along the lines of what Luke was saying, these blessings, and our own feelings about them, should compel us to make a difference. Something about Mandi that I've always admired is her desire to do something that will change the world. And I don't say that in a flippant manner, as it is something that she truly wants to do. And the more we've talked about what she wants, and the types of things that she's wanting to get involved in when she's finished up school and everything, I've seen just how much this means to her. I think that she sees how blessed she is, and she wants to go out and make a difference for people in any way that she can, wherever she can. She will do great things in the future.

I'm sorry to say that the attitude she exhibits is one that does not come easily to me, but I can't help but to be excited about it and want to help as well whenever she does talk about it. I have no idea what I will do that will have a huge impact, or whether anything I ever do will have what could be described as a huge impact, but the important thing is to get out there and do something. I have to thank Mandi for making me realize this. Given our incredible blessings, we should feel moved to go and make a difference for others who are not as fortunate as ourselves. Does that mean we need to move around the world in order to do this? Not necessarily. Does it mean you need to get out of your comfort zone? More than likely. All I know is that I need to take steps to make a difference. Before tomorrow comes, you could change everything. There's only one way to find out though.

Sun

I just wanted to mention, there's the question on the side panel now. If you feel like it, you're more than welcome to pick an answer. After a week I'll change it out and put up the answer to the previous week's question. We used to have the random mind-teaser thing a while ago, and I thought it might be fun to have it up again. I put one up last week...but it wasn't really that great of a question. This week's is quite a bit better I believe. It even appeals to Paul's history side. And who doesn't like something that involves Hannibal anyway? Just to clarify, we're not talking about Anthony Hopkins' character...in case that needed to be pointed out...

From a purely astronomical point of view, the sun is fairly average. It's of average size, it puts out an average amount of heat, it will live an average lifetime for a star. Taken in context with all the other stars in the universe, there really is nothing special about it. If you look at what it does for this particular area of the cosmos, however, you realize that it holds a very significant role. Were it not for the star that we call the Sun, there would not be life on this planet. There would just be no way that we could have survived. Granted, there are a number of other factors, but it just doesn't fit with what I'm trying to say to go in to all of those. I admit, I'm a fan of the sun. I love sunny days, especially in the fall and spring when it's bright and sunny, and yet not so hot that you start to sweat from walking out the door. I love days when you go to the beach, or to a park, or hiking in the mountains with a beautiful blue sky and the sun shining down. Sunsets can be some of the most beautiful natural events that happens so often that we easily come to forget about how pretty they really are. And even with how simple it seems from down here (we just get up in the morning, and up comes the sun for another day), there really is quite a bit going on to make it all work so that it actually emits energy that we get. There's so much that is still not understood about it. But it's still appreciated, and many times simply forgotten about as we expect it to work.

I have an album called Tension by a group known as Dizmas. Quite a strange name, and according to the band, "Dizmas is Greek; a lot of historians and theologians of the Bible believe that Dizmas was the name of the good thief on the cross next to Jesus. It's not biblical truth, so for us as a band, we don't necessarily claim it as absolute truth. The reason we decided to name ourselves Dizmas is more so that whenever somebody did ask us that same exact question (where did your name come from?), the first thing that we have to refer to is the day on the cross when Jesus Christ, in this guy's last breath, gave him a chance and gave him hope, and basically said "today you will be with Me in paradise." Just the hope for the thief that he had in those last minutes. That's kind of what we're trying to do is express hope to people found in Christ, and that's why we are named Dizmas."

The final song on that album (which is in the player coincidentally) is called 'Sun'. Now, if you listened to the song, and knew that the title was called 'Sun' but not the spelling, I think you would do as I did, and think that it was called 'Son'. Take a listen (it's about 2 minutes), and pay attention to the lyrics. I think that it's really easy to take God, who has made us and given us all these blessings, and to just get up in the morning and assume that he'll just keep on doing his 'job' while we go through our day. There is the easy trap to fall in to to just take the distant approach to God, and then say that there's nothing really all that special about it: 'Everyone has something that they believe in, so if yours is God, then that's great, for you'. And I think that's the approach that many now take today. But if you look closer, and move in for a more intimate view, you see that God is indeed special. He sent his Son to bring light to the world. His Son gives everlasting life. And His Son came willingly for us. We should be striving every day to serve Him because he deserves that from us. And because we should feel the need to serve Him, to show him some semblance of the love that he's shown us. How lucky we are, to have a Son do that for us, to show us that love in an incredibly personal way. Do I make you proud?

I'll Put Him In The Wall

Geico has always had fairly funny commercials, and this is probably one of their better ones, in my opinion. The first time I saw this I laughed quite a bit.

A Few Nights of Culture

This past weekend was quite busy. On Friday, I got to spend most of the day with Mandi for the first time in a while since she didn't have to go to Nashville for classes. It was a welcome break for her, as she's done for the semester. Just has a paper to write in the next couple of weeks. To celebrate, we went to Taste of Thai...possibly the best restaurant ever. At least when you're looking for Asian food. Josh, next time you're around here, we'll go to Magic Wok and then we'll go to Taste of Thai. You just can't be disappointed.

Saturday was filled with more work on the new additions in the house. Dad worked on getting wall studs put in so that we can put up electrical boxes for the room, which will allow electricity for the lighting and hot tub to get put in. I put on the second coat of paint in the room while he was drilling holes in the concrete floor. Maybe tonight we'll finish up some of the wall things in order to get the switches and such put in. It's coming along though. That evening, Mandi's dad had got tickets to a surprise something or other. I didn't know I was going, but at about 3:45 Mandi calls and says that there was a misunderstanding and I was supposed to be going with them. So I get going and show up to their place, and we leave about 5:40 with these mystery tickets. It turned out that the Knoxville Opera was doing a performance at a church in town, and since Mark's company was promoting it, he had gotten tickets for everything. So we were there from about 5:45 to 8:30 that night. Not the best example of opera as it was just piano and singing, but it was alright. Certainly nothing compared to Carmen that Mandi and I saw earlier in the year.

Sunday was a good day as well. Church in the morning, where we're doing an interesting study through the book of Acts. Yesterday's discussion centered on the story of Annanias and Sapphira. You remember the story, where they sell some land and bring the money, but falsely claim that they are bringing the whole amount that they received. They are both struck down and die immediately after they lie. The question that was discussed was mainly, why such a harsh punishment for this act? And how much blame could really be given to Sapphira who either had the choice of hanging her husband out to dry, or lying to Peter? Was she completely at fault herself? Or was it because she was married to Annanias and therefore was sort of brought along due to his sinfulness and harshly punished? It was interesting to think about.

Lunch was a spectacular Indian curry that Cathie made. I had not been a huge fan of my previous experience in Indian cuisine, so it was a pleasant surprise at how good this was. Actually, I think she said she got the curry from people from Qatar. So Qatar curry I guess is more appropriate for a description. The evening was finished off with a chocolate fest as one of the ladies in our small group was celebrating a birthday, so we brought all sorts of different chocolate desserts to the party. There was chocolate cheesecake prepared by a chef in our group, we made chocolate-peanut butter pie, there were cookies, chocolate fondue, ice cream cake...I'm pretty sure we were all on a sugar high. That might help explain some of why I'm not feeling all that well this morning...but it was worth it last night.

Something pretty cool that my mom does is the Foothills Craft Guild. Essentially it's a bunch of artists from around the area that are in this guild to show their crafts and artistic abilities. They are having a show this weekend where they are all displaying and selling their creations and such. It's really pretty neat. Mom will be displaying her Temari balls and her baskets that she makes, so she's pretty much frantically working on getting some things together since she's only been home for the past week or so. I've never actually gone to the show before, but Mandi and I plan on going this weekend at some point to look around. Should be pretty cool to see some of the things that people are making in the area. With all this culturizing (is that a word? I don't think so...) I don't quite know what I'll do with myself. I'll have to hold off for a while after this thought I'm thinking. Even so, in honor of culture (somewhat), the music in the player is from the Transformers movie score.

High on Paint

I have to say, I never thought it would take so long to paint such a small room. With the new additions to the house completed, and in an attempt to get most of mom's plants inside before the cooler weather kills them, we kind of went in to a frantic cleaning mode yesterday when the temperature was predicted to reach right around freezing. Brrr. First time all year, so off we go on a mad scramble to get room to move mom's plants in to the garage. In the two hours that we had, we were pretty successful. Of course, we didn't want them in the garage, so we failed miserable in that respect, but the addition requires a little work. First up is some waterproof sealer paint to be applied to the concrete blocks. So up I step to get this stuff painted. I think the room is maybe 10 feet by 18 feet or something like that. I figure it shouldn't take too long...but it took about 4.5 hours. And the latex paint that dad got was really pretty strong in terms of it's odor. My nose has been giving me this weird burning sensation all night. And I've felt a little weird...hopefully we'll be all good by tomorrow. Of course...there's the still the second coat to go.

Tonight I went with Mandi and her family down to Lauren's college (Bryan) in Dayton, TN to watch her in her last home volleyball game. They trounced the team they were playing 3-0 in a best of five series, and these were the conference champs. The college is quite small, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 students. The camps looked nice from what I could see of it. It's up on a hill, and I would imagine it's got quite a nice view if you have the chance to walk around and see it. It's just strange to me thinking of going to a college that has less people than the high school that you attended had. It seems like a nice school though, and judging by all the banners in their gym, they've got a pretty strong athletic program for such a small school. They even had Men's soccer. Take that UT.

Speaking of soccer, I added a Game of the Week description on the sidebar where I'll just put up a little blurb each week about the game that I'm most interested in from any of the leagues in the upcoming weekend. There's also a poll if you'd care to vote on it where you can pick who wins. So for the 5 people who regularly read this, there's a little something for you to do if you'd like. I was thinking there could be some cool prize or something, but there's not a whole lot that I can do in that department. I could perhaps proclaim your greatness on this blog the following day or something. How's that for incentive? Maybe we can even bet on it. This just keeps getting better. I just don't know how I'll get people what they've won. I guess if you vote and you're correct, you can have bragging rights or something. And I still need to implement a score guessing tie-breaker. How about if you actually do vote, post your score prediction as a comment, and we'll see how things go. Hoo-rah.

All Your Reasons

We've been having some very interesting discussions at our small group on Sunday nights. Our topics have been, well, the controversial ones I guess. The things like drinking/drugs, divorce, how to give, music in the church, etc. etc. I think next week is women's roles in the church. Although I'm not sure about that...it might not have been suggested actually. But at any rate, it's basically just a way for our group to discuss these types of issues, not with a goal of coming to a conclusion that we all agree with, but just to hear different people's opinions and other viewpoints that we might not have heard before. It's really been pretty neat, since there are a number of different backgrounds in our group, and getting to hear those differences, as well as just learning about new ways to view these things, has been pretty cool.

I think that one that surprised me a couple weeks ago dealt with giving. Apparently, this topic is quite a firestarter for some people, and I wouldn't have really guessed that. Some of the older people in our group have witnessed some heated debates about how to give, meaning, whether you should be putting something in the plate every Sunday, or whether you can give one lump sum one Sunday a month for the same amount. I wouldn't have really thought that it was an issue at all. Or whether you are obligated to be putting something in the plate every Sunday in the first place, since it's certainly not the only way that one can give. Am I saying that you should never put anything in monetarily? Absolutely not. But I certainly don't think that you should feel like you have to if your circumstances don't allow it.

Now, I know, we're certainly the most financially blessed nation, and even when we feel like we've got no money, we're really incredibly well off. I liked how our de-facto leader put it, when he said that giving comes of our abundance. And more importantly that money is not the only thing that we should be giving...it sadly just gets the most attention. I don't know...it's just been intriguing hearing these opinions, and all the reasons that people give for doing things a certain way.

One of the better things we've talked about deals with where you fall when the Bible is silent on an issue. You either see silence on a subject allowing you to go on with something since it is not expressly forbade, or you see it as a stop sign which you cannot cross. I think I fall in to the former category, although we've been in classes with other people that certainly fall in to the second group. And when you get in to these topics like divorce, or instrumental music, you get these viewpoints of what exactly we're supposed to do. Some will say that it's not mentioned that way in the Bible, so therefore we can't do it. Other's will say that the Bible is not our manual of minutiae and therefore shouldn't be expected to give example for every single little detail of our lives. (I'm not really entirely sure where I'm going with all this rambling...)

I guess in the end, for me at least, I just figure that you need to at least know all your reasons for doing and believing something. I don't think there will be ever be two people who will agree on all aspects of anything, whether it's religion-related or not. But if you know why you believe something, and you have your personal study to go with it, who's to say that you're wrong on something that's not said to be one way or the other in the Bible? I think on the whole the CoC is getting better about the "we're right, you're all wrong" thing that has given us the stigma that many others place on us. It's sad that it happens as that whole grace thing gets forgotten a lot it seems, but it's not like these types of issues will just go away.

I think what I'm learning is that I don't need to post stuff where I need to think this late at night. If this was incoherent, my apologies. Oh, one other thing of humor/surprise/shock. So, I go to church on Sunday, and I'm looking through the reading material during the slow periods (the announcement sheet) and see that church service for Wednesday has been switched to Tuesday. Now, we meet at the local YMCA, so you might think there would be a pretty good reasons, like maybe they were holding some meeting or the building was going to have some work done on it or something. Nope. They've moved it since Halloween is on Wednesday. I guess they wanted to make sure we work the Halloween spirit in to our week.