...then never

In this blog I will teleport you backward one week. It was, as you may recall, resurrection Sunday 7 days ago. My parents and I drove up to Bemidji and spent the day goofing off with my brother. Here are some fabulous pictures of our adventures. And maybe a video or two, if I can get them to load. The DSL is painfully slow sometimes.

People ask me where I am from originally. This is it, central Minnesota.

We tossed a frisbee around for a while, and Dad tried to hit the camera. He came really, really close. Out of our family, he is usually the most accurate at disk golf.












My brother conquered the plastic playground mountain. I then proceeded to boulder almost the entire way around it without touching the ground, with some guidance from dad, who could look around the corners for me and find holds.

We didn't know if we would fit, but we managed to get all three of us- my dad, my brother, and I- in the slide at once.

This is the closest we could get to a normal family picture. We are way too goofy for serious pictures.

Give Heed to Yourself

"give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently, so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen and they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons."- Deuteronomy 4:9

Give heed to yourself. That doesn't mean we are self-absorbed or self-centered. It means we are self-aware. Quite simply, nobody needs to make us drift away from God. We do it all on our own in the process of time if we do not guard our souls diligently. We need to be proactive about pursuing God and remembering the reasons for our faith. We need to daily review the evidence that led to our belief ("the things which your eyes have seen") and integrate them into the way we live and react to that which is around us. True faith moves from the head to the heart, where it becomes the guiding force for even the most gut-level reactions. When we allow ourselves to stagnate, the faith begins to pull out of the heart and return to the head. This results in hypocrisy. Actions reflect heart belief and influence mind belief. Eventually, as the small amounts of hypocrisy grow into larger amounts, and the natural repercussions pursue, the mental faith seems more and more illogical, since it is increasingly out of line with experienced reality, and even the mental faith begins to warp into a syncretistic mockery of truth. If left unchecked, the collapse is spectacular and often hurts many more people than just us.

It also robs the future generations of a heritage. Maintaining our spiritual health is more than just a service to ourselves and an honor to God; it is also the hope of the future. We need to pass on a vibrant, logical faith to the next generation. We need to give them evidence, not just slogans. We need to model men and women after God's heart, not just people who know lingo and some christianesque dance steps. We need to be consumed by a constant pursuit of God, not a constant pursuit of religious business.
The gifts from God are the most priceless things we possess, both for ourselves and for those around us. May we guard them with the ferocity of a rottweiler.

French

I now have some new French materials that should help me to go at the language in a much more systematic way. The BBC website has given me a lot of nice little phrases, but I prefer to be able to parse lists of verbs and memorize vocab lists, even if it is more boring.