Another neat video... "Yes, I love technology..... not as much as you you see..... but, still, I love technology.... always and forever.... always and forever."
I know it's base, but I find Chuck Norris jokes hill-arious.
When Chuck Norris plays Oregon Trail his family does not die from cholera or dysentery, but rather roundhouse kicks to the face. He also requires no wagon, since he carries the oxen, axels, and buffalo meat on his back. He always makes it to Oregon before you.
When Chuck Norris was denied a Bacon McMuffin at McDonalds because it was 10:35, he roundhouse kicked the store so hard it became a KFC.
Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table, because Chuck Norris only recognizes the element of surprise.
Mike Huckabee - just might make Arkansas a respectable state again?
Anyone have any thoughts/knowledge on him?
His website. A significant part of his adult life was spent as a pastor and denominational leader. He became the youngest president ever of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, the largest denomination in Arkansas. Huckabee led rapidly growing congregations in Pine Bluff and Texarkana. He said those experiences gave him a deep sense of the problems faced by individuals and families.
Huckabee, a fiscal conservative, pushed through the Arkansas Legislature the first major, broad-based tax cuts in state history - a $90 million tax relief package for Arkansas families. He led efforts to establish a Property Taxpayers' Bill of Rights and created a welfare reform program that reduced the welfare rolls in the state by almost 50 percent. He also doubled the standard deduction to $2,000 for single taxpayers and $4,000 for those who are married. He proposed The Property Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights which established a uniform notice and due process procedure to guarantee that all Arkansans will be treated fairly in property tax assessment.
In total, Huckabee cut taxes and fees over 90 times during his ten and a half years as governor, saving the people of Arkansas almost $380 million. When he left office, Arkansas had over $800 million in state surplus, which he believes should go back to the people in the form of either a tax rebate or tax cut.
Lew taught out of the book of Jude. Said to find it, you go to Haggai and go forward 28 books.
Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James...
Neat to see how he was also Christ's brother, but didn't lay claim to that for influence or emphasis, but calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ.
Jude 1:3 Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.
Lew pointed out the picture of Jude sitting down, planning to write to the "church" about salvation, but the Holy Spirit led him differently - on a Divine Interruption - to write to them about "contending for the faith."
Lew taught about how we are commanded to contend for the faith and the way that we do this is by keeping ourselves in God's love via:
Edification - building selves up in faith Supplication - praying in the Holy Spirit Anticipation - eagerly awaiting and hoping for His return
Convicting quote by Dwight L. Moody - "I have never seen a useful Christian who was not a student of God's Word."
Lew stressed vehemently that the he no longer studies "the bible." He studies Jesus Christ - and the bible IS Jesus Christ in written form.
Another verse Lew pointed out that was thought-provoking for me: 1 John 2:28 And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.
Sobering thought - that there will be Christians who will be ashamed before him.
In case you were interested, sorry my posting of our vacation went into a steep nose-dive. Took me about three days to actually work out where I could connect at camp, plus we took pretty much zero pictures until the last day.
Camp was great as always. The teaching, bible-study, fellowship and laughing together was superb. The new location (due to the Jewish group having purchased the old FCA camp near Turkey Run state park where we used to meet) in Roach, MO at Windemere Baptist camp was NOT so great.
The camp was designed more for middle-school/high-schoolers, of which, there were a-plenty. There was always a considerable line for the meals at the dining hall, and it was incredibly crowded and loud. There were more-often-than-not chants of "Take all you want, but eat all you take! Take all you want, but eat all you take!" Our group was not able to sit all together, we just had to do our best to find a place to sit and hear one another amongst all the other kids. I greatly missed our entire group having a smaller, more cozy area for just us.
We no longer had an actual chapel in which to hold our meetings and teaching. Instead, we had a large conference room that worked fine, but I definitely prefer the old meetin' place.
You have to love the sense of humor of the folks who attend with us - for example - on the first day when talking about how many things would be different, Dave Miller's quote of the day was, "We know that Camp 2007 is going to be a horrible failure, but we're going to make the best of it."
The fact that our room was comfortably large and attached to said conference room was a plus over the old camp. Another positive of the new camp was the large outdoor swimming pool that we used pretty much every day of camp.
I will greatly miss our brothers and sisters in Christ from Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, Maine... Camp and the people who attend with us feels more like the unified body of Christ than anything else I ever experience.
I highly recommend you pray about whether next year YOU are supposed to attend with us.
Like I said, I did not get many pictures at all, because it's just so much fun and you are so busy from the get go, that you kind of forget about your camera for awhile. We did get some pics right before leaving camp and we have a few videos of skit night which I'll try to post later. Plus, Damon Steele is going to try to put together some kind of camp blog maybe so people from the "Indiana Bible Conference" can post pics and stuff for mutual viewing enjoyment.
We woke up fairly refreshed... the kids slept great, although they accused one-another of pulling the sheets off. Jenny and I both had awoken at some point during the night and put the covers back on them.
It was so nice not having to rush around to get ready and be anywhere by any specific time. I love that. Jenny was cooperative and didn't mind me not rolling out of bed until around 8:30 to shower. We all headed down for a nice breakfast together.
Emily saw her friend she had made at the pool last night - Sasha. Sasha and her older brother Roman were both adopted from Russia about 7 years ago. They were from Iowa and were just in St. Louis for the one night and day. We gave Sasha Jenny's e-mail address so she could write to Emily. Hope that Emily's knack for meeting new people will be used by God to advance His Kingdom.
My beautiful bride and the boys wide awake and ready to take on the day! We headed out from the hotel and drove the short distance to the St. Louis zoo. Unfortunately we forgot our Mesker zoo pass (which gave us half-price on the zooline railroad, children's zoo, carousel, sea lion show, 3-D movie and the Wild Ride. So, it was really nice to be close to the zoo as we were able to drive back to the hotel and get our zoo pass from the room (and the young fella' at the parking lot gate let us leave and come back through his lane even though he "really wasn't supposed to.")
We did end up buying the "safari pass" to do all of the above items, and with the mesker zoo card it was half-price, so we got to do it all (except for the train since it broke down) for $6 each. And since the train broke down, I went to guest services late in the day and asked for a "pro-rated discount" since we did not get to ride the train. (With the pass, we should have been able to ride it all day.) I was satisfied to get my $7 and some change refund.
I splurged 50cents and let the kids smash a penny, engraving it with a monkey. Only in America, right?
Map in hand, Jacob was allowed to pick our route and he wanted to head towards the elephants first.. ah, how proud I was. We walked through the "River's Edge" exhibit and I forced the family to stand for this shot of the dead impala in the tree.
Love the gi-normous African aquarium where the fish try to feed off of the hippo's bottoms. We finally made it to the star of the show - the Elephants! And as if adult elephants alone are not cool enough, we got to see an added bonus: baby elephant. This little gal will be one year old in August of '07. They said they have another baby elephant that was born in February, but she stays inside until late in the evening as she is still bottle-fed. We missed getting some video of the baby playing as she stomped/ran through the water. Really cool.
In case you weren't aware: Elephants good; donkeys bad.
After we saw how long it took us to just get through the River's Edge exhibits, I decided to take the map and set up a schedule to enable us to see as many of the animal feedings and shows as possible. It hurt my head trying to figure out what shows started at what time and how to get to everything we wanted to see in time. We mapped out our route as follows:
12:30 sea lion feeding 1:00 sea lion show (emily was chosen from the crowd to work with the trainer and the female sea lions. she was able to throw them several fish and even a large squid towards the end of the act. jen got video of the show - i may try to post that later.) 2:00 insectarium 2:30ish - lunch 3:00 - children's zoo (who trains who) showed how they train some animals 3:30 - feed the penguins 4:00 - feed the bears
Our camera batteries ran out at some point, so we missed a lot of photos unfortunately. Had a great day at the zoo - headed back to the hotel, let the kids swim awhile while I blogged a bit, while Jen read watching the kids swim. Then I read while Jen worked out for about 40 minutes.
Headed back to the room and ate some sammiches, apples, cherries, peaches an' stuff while the kid watched the "extreme cake challenge" on food network.
Saturday morning... had the oil changed in the truck, the rear-differential fluid changed and some carbon cleansing dealio done to the truck. I cleaned and re-oiled our air filter, then Jacob and I went at 11:00ish to pick up our Angel-Food ministries orders. Once we put all the food away we headed out of Dodge.
Listened to some Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire audio book on the way to St. Louis. Peaceful, uneventfuly trip most of the way to St. Louis - thanks to Jen's egg-sah-lent packing skills with snacks and drinks and pillows. We stopped for a bathroom break and to look at an Ocean Mist Saturn Outlook at a dealership. We didnt' like it as much as we thought we would. Kind of liked the chocolatey-colored one second to the Tri-Diamond White.
Drove into St. Louis and parked (for free after looking for awhile) down by the river and walked down towards the arch.
Saw two ladies and a young man pulling in a nice blue channel cat - unfortunately did not get a photo of that. Chatted with them for a few minutes, they were familiar with Evansville, primarily for Casino Aztar where they said they'd visited for gambling. We mentioned we were going to a church camp and they asked if it was like a revival. I told them about Lew and how he had been a missionary in Taiwan and a Soutern Baptist pastor and it was like family with people coming in from Florida, Indiana, Maine, Iowa, Arkansas... the lady said, "Sound like a good ole' fashioned revival to me!" It was neat talking to them. For some reason, being on vacation makes me chatty and interested in talking to "strangers" much more so than when "at home."
We walked a pretty decent distance down the riverfront to the steps going up to the arch. It was quite crowded and interesting for the kids to see how they check baggage and we had to go through metal detector and stuff.
Inside the arch national park we watched a cool movie on Alaska, walked around the arch museum and then went up into the arch.
Had a good time and headed back to the truck. The weather was great, not too hot - and walking through the trees near the arch area was slow and peaceful.
Once we got back to the truck we were in for a relatively stressful drive west on 64 towards the zoo (it was already around 6:45ish) looking for a hotel. Suffice it to say we did a frustrating bit of driving around, then back-tracking and finally made it to the Hampton right across 64 from the St. Louis zoo. Kids got to go swimming awhile... well, Jacob decided he wanted to dive, even after being told not to, and lost his swimming privileges after about 20 minutes - so he and Jenny went back to the room.
Jen got a chance to workout on the elliptical machine for about 30 minutes and it was like a shot-in-the-arm for her. It's amazing to me how she enjoys something that seems like torture to me!
Got the kids some lunch-meat, cheese, grapes, carrots from the cooler and settled into the hotel beds to watch some food network while I worked on this entry!
Probably go to the zoo tomorrow, unless we can find something that we get a good deal or discount on for staying at this Hampton.
I think this story is funny. Who doesn't think about saying something nutty to get off of jury duty? I know Jenny failed to appear one time and they called her about it.. Jen told them something to the effect of, well did you want me to drag my three kids as well as the other two I was baby-sitting along with me into court? She's bold, yes; but not as bold as the dude in the story.
Our dear friend Shannon Okesson left her earth-suit to be with her Lord and King on Friday, the 29th of June. Jenny and I are better individuals and have a stronger marriage for having the privilege of sharing life with Shannon. We rejoice that she is celebrating and in the presence of Majesty - but it really, really hurts knowing how sorely we will miss her.
I'd never really listened to the words of this song until Friday night when Jenny played it during a precious time of mourning, grieving over the temporary, painful loss of someone so incredibly precious.
Mercy Me - Homesick
You're in a better place, I've heard a thousand times And at least a thousand times I've rejoiced for you But the reason why I'm broken, the reason why I cry Is how long must I wait to be with you
I close my eyes and I see your face If home's where my heart is then I'm out of place Lord, won't you give me strength to make it through somehow I've never been more homesick than now
Help me Lord cause I don't understand your ways The reason why I wonder if I'll ever know But, even if you showed me, the hurt would be the same Cause I'm still here so far away from home
I close my eyes and I see your face If home's where my heart is then I'm out of place Lord, won't you give me strength to make it through somehow I've never been more homesick than now
In Christ, there are no goodbye And in Christ, there is no end So I'll hold onto Jesus with all that I have To see you again To see you again
And I close my eyes and I see your face If home's where my heart is then I'm out of place Lord, won't you give me strength to make it through somehow Won't you give me strength to make it through somehow Won't you give me strength to make it through somehow
