the dance...

Our faith seems to be like a dance. 

A dance that appears to be made up of two partners, one being faith and the other action.  Faith cannot not be accompanied by action nor action act outside of faith, the two must go hand in hand.

But in my own life I’ve let one of the dance partners take too strong of a lead and overpower and maybe even overshadow the other. The guilty tyrant in this dance is faith.  I’ve let faith excuse my lake of action. 

But a echo in my life as of late has been God gently reminding me of my  need for action.  To move my belief from my heart to my hands, from my head to my feet.

This morning I was reminded of this as I read John the Baptist’s words against the Pharisee in his day.  To paraphrase him in my own words he said “the Fruit trees that are not producing fruit are about to get toppled, they’re about to be firewood”

Fruitless fruit trees? Nonsense!

Is that like a loveless Christian, or maybe a resentful Christian, or possibly a charity-less Christian?

But you don’t know what they did!

I’m so extremely busy right now.

When we’re out of this recession then I’ll be able to…

I have my excuses, I have my reasons, but God was clear, Fruit trees bear fruit, and people who are followers of the way of Jesus are moved to action.

Lunch and Coffee

Lunch at Five Guys

A little coffee at Starbucks

Now sitting at class

Today was a fun-full day 

stories, names, and a baby

A new year has come and with it the gentle reminder to pick up things once desired to do but simply overpowered and forgotten in the midst of everyday life. 

One such “desire” of mine is to blog.  I’ve been blogging off and on for a couple of years now, slowly baring my soul to an unknown audience of internet passer by-ers (nice grammar Matt). And so today I pick back up my “pen” and try and express some of my inner thoughts.  In a sense this is cheap therapy for me since I am forming and expressing my inner rumblings. 

Like many I know from my Church I am starting off the New year with a desire to read through the New Testament in 2009. I’m a couple of days late getting started but late is better then never.

Today I read the first chapter of Matthew, I said I was just getting started.  As I rolled through the genealogy of Christ, and the retelling of his birth I could not help but picture myself sitting next to a fire in the middle of a town square with a small crowd of people listening to a town elder retelling one of our greatest stories.  I image myself hanging on each of his words, and with anticipation longing to hear the unfolding of the story yet again.

I imaged myself making little mental checkboxes as the names where rattled off, like mini “ah ha” moments, as I recognized the names of the main characters of so many of my beloved stories.  The who’s-who’s list of my tradition being read, as mini dramas of their life flashed before my mind. 

The building of my faith, the reminding of my past, the culmination of all that we believe, serving not as the main story but as the opening lines of dialog.  I image the storyteller bouncing through the names with energy, speed, excitement, and then with a great exhale, pausing to let us hang in the tension of what would be next. 

Mary, a Baby, God with us, Immanuel.

Thousand of years of faith, tradition and stories all coming to one place, one moment, one manger, one teenage girl, one scared father, one little baby.

I once skimmed by the genealogies in scripture, mostly because the difficultly of the names frustrated me.  But today I read the names not as a nuisance but as a building crescendo of our faith, building through the fabric of all we hold true to lay open to the next great story, the story of Jesus.

Homemade soup, pixelmator and me

The other day while at work I found out that I got a pretty sweet deal on a program called "pixelmator" (yes, I do feel like I'm "towmator" from cars every time I say it's name, just gotta have fun with that) When I say a sweet deal, I mean something like 100% off, which really turned out to be only 70%, but it was still cheap enough for me to make the jump and get it.

I have been looking for a photoshop like program for a while now, but didn't want to spend the hundreds for Photoshop, wasn't really impressed with my free trail of Photoshop elements, but when this came across my path with a mere $15 price tag  I was convinced.

Pearl and I have had a delightfully wonderful day relaxing at home, making homemade soup, and just putzing around on our computers.  So as Pearl sleep/watched a online show I learned a little about my new found "pixelmator"

here's a couple of my first projects.  Nothing too crazy, just simple layers and effects, but still a start.