Chicago

What a long day it has been. It started out at 4am central time to make my flight in Atlanta. I went a little early because I love to sit in the concourse and watch people. So many people going so many different places and doing so many different things.

I made it to Chicago around 10:30am or so. I got to meet up with several of the people I work with on a daily basis. We don’t see each other very often. What a great bunch of people. I have been truly blessed to be able to work for and with them.

After a half day at the office it was time to take off and eat something. A few of us went out and grabbed a bite to eat. We went and had some deep dish Chicago pizza at Lou Malnati’s. Very good!

To end the day up and what has ended up being the highlight for the day. I went out for a walk to check out all of the these really tall buildings. I meet a guy named Anthony. We had a 30 minute conversation about the book of Romans. He didn’t know who the author was but he had a tract that had 5 or 6 versus from the book of Romans. We had a great conversation about God, Jesus, and Paul. He started out trying to tell me a story to get some money but it ended up being a wonderful conversation and then I gave him some money. I’m a sucker! He even ended up walking me up Whaker street for about 4 blocks or so showing me where he currently sleeps at night and where he had his bike locked up. He also had some great stories about the filming of Batman on lower Whaker.

Can you wrap up a day any better than that?

Here are some of the pictures I took today. Hspur’s Facebook Album

Geek Card.

I am turning in my geek card. I have spent the last two night trying to get something to work that will never work. I’m trying to do an operating system upgrade on an older server that I take care of. I burned a nice new version of Ubuntu 8.0.4 LTS. I’m thinking to myself oh yea this is going to be great. So I stick the disk into the cdrom and nothing and try to boot the server. The server acts like it doesn’t have a cdrom device to boot off of. So I fiddle around with the bios settings and this and that and waste about two hours on trying to get this thing to boot the cdrom. Turns out I had burned my operating system image to a dvd-r not a cd-r! OOOPS. Hey guess what an old CD drive doesn’t know how to boot up off of a dvd-r disk. humm go figure.

Time to get some rest I need it. What an idiot…. Gosh.

Online Small Group Ministry

This fall we are going to try and host a small group bible study online. I have setup a forum to accommodate this effort. I would appreciate it if everyone would go check it out. Feel free to register for an account and browse around. If you don’t register for an account you will not see all of the features on the forum. Just browse around, kick the tires and give me some feedback. Also if your interested in joining early just drop me an email on the forum and I will make sure to let you know when we get started this fall. I would love to have you.

Here’s the address: Small Groups Ahead

Thank you!

Playground Fun!

A friend of mine and I were having some fun on the new playground at church last Sunday.  Two things I need to point out is Spider Man doesn’t wear Flip Flops and he isn’t going bald.

Wordle

Ok everyone else has done a wordle post. I just had to try it. Check out a couple of the others.

What’s in a Wordle on The Damascus Blog? - Scott

Wordle - Andi

At first I was like ok that’s cool but it really doesn’t mean too much. I did one on all of my blog posts and seems to have gathered my general sentiment for the site. Notice the large bold words in the middle. Now I think it’ really cool.

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Working Out?

How much time do you spend keeping you body in shape?  1 hour per day maybe 2? per week? :)  Think about a professional athlete.  They spend hours upon hours per day training to be the best they can be.  They have coaches helping them along the way.  But the athlete has to do all of the work not the coach to get better at what ever it is they do.  They study other athletes in the same sport to learn from them.  It’s the hard work and devotion to their sport that makes an athlete better at what they do.

Here is where I’m going with this.  Are you spending time in the bible?  1 hour per day maybe 2?  What is your workout plan for knowing God?  Is Sunday your big workout day?  How can you become fit working out once a week?  The pastor at your church is your coach but he can’t do the work for you.  You have to do all of the work to gain any benefit.  I think we all need to become “professional” Christians.  My personal workout plan sucks when you consider whats at stake.  I spend maybe 30min to an hour every other day reading the bible.  This just isn’t going to cut it if I want to trim off the spiritual flabbiness.

Paul had some words for Timothy on this very topic.  The scripture below is from the Message translation.

1 Timothy 6-10You’ve been raised on the Message of the faith and have followed sound teaching. Now pass on this counsel to the followers of Jesus there, and you’ll be a good servant of Jesus. Stay clear of silly stories that get dressed up as religion. Exercise daily in God—no spiritual flabbiness, please! Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever. You can count on this. Take it to heart. This is why we’ve thrown ourselves into this venture so totally. We’re banking on the living God, Savior of all men and women, especially believers.

Thanks bslash for pointing this out to me!

WordPress for iPhone

Ok now I’m getting the iPhone envy.  Just kidding still cool stuff though.

WordPress application for the iPhone