I was on the way home today listening to the radio and the news came on talking about a shooting that happened in Colorado about 35 miles from Columbine. They were interviewing a pastor of one of the local pastors and he seemed rehearsed, not like he rehearsed his answers or anything, but kinda like he always has the right answers type of thing. He sounded like I am a pastor let me quote some scripture that fits the situation, but he hasn't been in the situation and can't relate to you. Anyway he said, "The entire book of Job is about the Lord gives and the Lord takes away and Blessed be the name of the Lord." The pastor follows this up with another statement saying, "And it's not our job to find out the reason for why something happens, the reason is in the mind of God and we don't need to know why as long as God does." Those two statements have a depth in them that we should all desire to know. The level of revelation contained in those sentences is amazing. If we could only live our lives through those truths, it would make things so much easier on ourselves. Anyway, I thought that I should share this with you. It's been an exhausting day...God bless.

EDIT: This was on a Christian Radio Station.

An interesting observation is this: In our Christian walk it seems that there is many times where God puts us in situations that are hard on us, He makes us do things that move us out of comfort zone. Just as we get comfortable its time for a new challenge. It’s interesting because we don’t know what we are doing and we don’t know how it applies to our calling. I think that what god is doing is simple; He is teaching us another farming technique. We may start out digging holes to plant seeds, or pruning the plants or harvesting the fruit, but we start out in one area of farming. The next thing He does is switch us to something totally different; we don’t get it because now we are climbing latter’s and picking fruit or driving a tractor to harvest wheat or corn. It’s important to remember that God has a plan and that even if we can’t see the bigger picture we don’t have to. At one point this was a really profound revelation but now its hard to duplicate…oh well.

I would like to say that God truly has blessed me these past couple of days. And there is nothing more to say i guess.

In our daily lives, as humans, we have many aspects of ourlives that require our time and attention. These areas include school, work, relationships, bills, and our spiritual walk among countless others. Each time we devote time to an area of our life we are juggling. We spend some time paying our bills and then we throw it in theair while we concentrate on work, then we throw that in the air as we devotetime and energy into our relationships before tossing that to the sky aswell. And this is how our life goes, one by one tossing each area of our life into the air and hoping to catch it before we allow things to get out ofcontrol.

It's amazing the messes that we manage to avoid - not without cost though. Every time we loft something into the air that thing, that area of our life now demands some internal memory dedicated to that issue so as to not lose control (we will be using some computer speak here -any techie's that want to contest some of my analogies please let me know). Most of us people seem to come without the required memory available to handle all of the things that we throw into the air. The next thing that happens is that we get memory overload and our life gets blue screened or we get this pop-up that says physical memory dump starting in 59,58, 57, 56, 55, 54, 53...ect. You get the idea. And that's when it all crashes. Our life turns to shambles and we are left in ruins. Hopefully we have our life stored on a backup hard drive with the ability to put everything back into place. For most of us, these crashes only happen once in a while and seem to be 'only' 'some' or 'several' of these areas of our life, as we are able to make several miraculous catches on our way down. Come to think of it we make better wide receivers than we do computers.....

As far as humans go we see varying degrees of skill when itcomes to juggling, sure we can point to CEO'S and other people who seem to have it together, but I assure you, they are dropping things to i.e. HP's CEO. This leads us to one conclusion, we are not capable of handling all areas of our lives, and my best guess says that we weren't intended to. As a matter of fact, my experience tells me that any time I focus to long or to hard on one area of my life, the other areas fall down. My personal experience shows me that as capable as I am as a person, I can truly only handle one thing at a time…and that’s tuff for me because by nature I am a multi-tasker. If I wanted to I could try to show everyone how much I have it together and hold off for as long as possible with dropping the ball, but the truth is, I can’t do it, atsome point I will fail – the question is, “How long will it take me to learn?”

See, this is where Christ comes in, as Christians we have this amazing resource at our disposal. We can set our lives apart, focus truly and solely on this resource and that resource will juggle for us. That resource is Christ. And let me tell you, he is a pretty good juggler. In my personal life, when I am sitting on the ground collecting everything that fell down, that’s when I usually give everything to Christ and things tend to start running smooth again. It’s when we start to take over that the problems start again. Most of us don’t even realize we are juggling again until things start to go wrong.

I am here to tell you folks, it’s a lot easier to juggle onething with two hands than the alternative. This is long, I know, it’s just my life on a screen. Hopefully it means something to someone…Good Night.

How many of you ever find yourself doing things out of character and at some point in time you realize what you are doing, you look at yourself and don't know why you are doing it, and you know that it can be stopped, and then you stop it??? This has been happening to me a lot lately...it intrigues me, what is God doing in my life? Anyway more later, hopefully with good news to share with all of you.

Well, good news...I passed my Real Estate Exam today so as soon as i send in my application and it's in the mail i am officially licensed to buy and sell real estate for consideration (the technical description). Also, we hung out in Michigan City a bit today and my lovely wife Autumn decided she wanted to play on the McDonalds playground, so being the good husband I am I told her it was ok under one condition...She had to take little Becka with her. Feel free to check out the pictures in my photo blog under McDonald's somewhere in Michigan City. We also hung out with some friends today, whom we lovingly call the Hemker Heads...it was fun, we had Chicken Parmesan. Alas, that was my day, it was a very good day.

Yesterday was one of those day's that was really high...and really low, but in the reverse order. There were some amazing things that I learned. I would really like to share some of the things, but not really, so I have compromised with myself and will share with you one trinket of new wisdom I gained. Here it is:

Yesterday both of my friends talked with me about seeing our life as a spiritual person having a physical experience, yea, yea we all know the cliché, right? But do we experience the cliché? One comment was made that people view themselves through there physical body but don't realize that if they lose a finger, arm, or leg they have not lost any part of themselves. As spiritual beings we are contained within ourselves, we are not our physical bodies, we are what is within our bodies, if we loose a part of our body that doesn't take away from who we are...it is difficult to write out revelation.

The other part of this whole thing is people. People who shine their lights. My friend also talked about people, Christian who have started off life bad but then had a salvation experience and turned there less than glamorous decisions into amazing ministry opportunities, things like drug clinics, single mother’s supports groups, prison ministry, ect. We don't want to go to prison so we can start a prison ministry, but you know the guy who has one has a heart for the people who he ministers too. Same goes for drug clinics and homeless shelters.

It's amazing to see these people's lights shining in the city one of the friends said. As you look around the city, do you see the lights shining? I was blown away at the thought of those people's little shacks and poorly funded ministries as being lights in a city. Does that do something to your insides? Does it completely change the way you see things? As a spiritual being who walks around the city how many lights are shining? As we allow the Lord to open our eyes in this way, and maintain a spiritual perspective...I think we would see the lights shine brighter and brighter, but those who are evil...are blinded by the light...

I am a physical person who once in a while has a spiritual experience, at least that's how I live. I think about everyone lights shining and I told my wife, it's like we are a bristle on a Christmas tree and all we see are other bristles, then one day God opens our eyes to a light next to us (as my friend did) and then we start to see one a little farther away, then another, and another. And as we grow in the Lord and develop relationships with these believers they open our eyes to others who are lights. As this happens we begin to see an entire network of lights and the string that holds them together. I have a suspicion that if we got the opportunity to get off of the tree and see it from across the room I think we would realize that all of the lights are off in the house except for the ones attached to the Christmas tree. And I think that if we stood outside at night we would be able to see the lights on the tree inside and if we stepped back even further I think we would only see I giant light glowing from inside a house down the road....and I think its a powerful image of what happens as we give up a little bit more of ourselves and begin to live our lives as spiritual people have a physical experience......

One more quick thought, it seems that we think about what it will be like once we get to eternal life, I’ve got news for ya, you received eternal life when you were saved, let’s enjoy the journey.

EDIT: My wife reminded me that in our original conversation I told her that we are also lights on the Christmas tree...this also works very well in the analogy, we just have to make sure that if we are going to be lights we have to make sure we are all the way screwed in (or connected to Christ)