A life with Christ isn’t always all rainbows.

Psalm 80 is a brutally honest prayer.  ”O God, How long will you be angry Against the prayer of Your people?  You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in great measure.  You have made us a strife to our neighbors, And our enemies laugh among themselves.” (Psalm 80:4-6)

Tell God how you really feel.  But do note how the prayer started and ended.  The beginning is full of praises of God’s sovereignty and of His name.  He ends his prayer admitting that he needs God, and that only God alone can help him, “Restore us, O God; Cause Your face to shine, And we shall be saved!”

Be real with God, he desires to hear all of your troubles and is only waiting for you to ask him to move into your life and work in a huge way through it.

“I am ready to hear [your] prayers for those blessings, and I am ready to grant [you] [your] requests.” Ezekiel 36:37

Develop deeper relationships with people who you can grow with and can stand up to the hard rocks of life.  Talk about bigger things than football, music or movies, those things aren’t bad, interests are great things and are great to talk about and have in common with our friends.  But…

What about asking questions like:  What are you dreams?  What are your life goals? How have you grown as a believer this week?  How can I pray for you?

And then you can follow up with them on those things:  How are you doing with that dream of yours?  I read this verse and I thought of you.  Pray for them, with them, not just when you leave their presence.  Let’s grow as a church, as a body of Christ.

The Bible is a story about Love, not rules.

So, I’m finally a little more settled down so I was able to get my website back up and running, it is now on a different server, other than my own, so it should be up 24hrs every day, whether I move or not.

For those of you who do not know why my site has been down, it is because I was hosting it on my server, and moved to Saint Louis, so there was some down time L.

Job

I’ve been working at Customer Direct for a week and a half now, I start my 2^nd full week tomorrow, and each day is just as exciting and enjoyable as the next. I am the ‘Number 2’ or the 2^nd lead programmer for their IT Product Solutions. —- caution: more detailed approaching: Customer Direct outsources Customer Service and is a 24 hour shop. They have clients, customers, phone agents, internet agents, who all must be monitored, recorded, be able to log and store data in regards to tickets, hours, problems, good things bad things, yada yada yada. :: big breath :: So in order to have that function, an IT Department is required, and so I am a part of the development and maintenance of the online application that controls this whole system.

There, that wasn’t so bad was it? You got it over with, you know a little more about what I do and you improved your reading skill by .000000000001% – maybe.

Home

I am pleased to call my new home by rent, “The Basement of My Sister”. I know what you’re thinking, but STOP, it’s so great and there’s not much more that I could ask for at the moment. I have my own domain, my own parking spot, home cooked meals, my own area in the bathroom, and I’m around family all the time, did I mention the home cooked meals?! There’s not much that beats that for a 19 year old – Life is good, and I feel blessed that I have a family who understand and are willing to help other family members, whether it’s a huge deal or a small deal, so I am very grateful.

Question: why do you spell grateful as grate when grate is a synonym for annoy, irritate, aggravate, vex? – very interesting, I’d like to know.

Labor day, filled with fun, amazing food, family, and especially a nevertiring joyful nephew .

I went back to my home town this weekend, Rock Island, for labor day weekend, and luckily enough Caleb (muh brother), Jenny (muh sister in law), Zeke (muh nephew), and Anabelle (muh niece) came down this weekend also! Which was great because I haven’t seen them in over 2 and a half months, and you know how fast little kids grow and it’s amazing.

Zeke became my best friend for the weekend and brought back childhood memories which was great, I played legos, gi-joes, cars, baseball with a tee, and a game over neverending movement, haha. The greatest part about it, is you (atleast I) always wish to go back to childhood and play those much loved activities like legos, but If you actually did it you’d say, “I could be doing somethign much better with my time” haha and you’d look silly. But the greatest thing is when you’re with your almost 3 year old nephew, you look silly to him if you don’t play.

YAY for excuses to go back to childhood.