Friday, December 31, 2004
A Brief Recap of This Current Season:
As the year draws to a close, I decided to recap what all I have experienced in the past year. I then realized that years are rather arbitrary ways of marking time, so I decided to start with the last major transition in my life, which goes back about two years. Anyway, in this season of my life I have experienced (in no particular order):
• The death of both my grandmothers.
• The remarriage of my mother.
• Learning that God's sovereign plan for my life will not necessarily be revealed to me ahead of time, if at all, and that if I'm being conformed to His Word, walking by faith, and trying to please Him, I'm allowed some apparent freedom in doing what I want to do.
• Learning about the important role of the local church in a christian's life.
• Learning a great deal about the Bible, theology, and how to think both rationally and biblically.
• Getting prideful about newfound knowledge, and getting humbled for not realizing that all I know is a insignificant drop in the bucket.
• Learning patience and grace for others, and that not every hill is worth dying on.
• Indian food.
• Learning that walking by faith necessarily includes walking.
• Joining and quitting a band that later got signed.
• Heartbreak and getting over it.
• Building my own custom Jazzmaster guitar.
• Quitting my job and moving to a new city to find work.
• Moving again... and again...
• The Fender Jaguar Baritone Custom.
• Starting to look for a house to buy.
• Pre-shelled hazelnuts by the bag.
Things will continue to change. The bad always comes too soon and the good seems to take forever, but what can I say? God is good, and I can't really complain. Happy New Year.
Labels: life
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
May it be filled with an optimal amount of persons, places, things, stuff, and other things.
And the recognition of the fact that this whole overcommercialized holiday racket is over until at least next August (and thank God for that).
Seriously, why can't they overcommercialize and ruin some crappy holiday like Arbor Day or something? ("Okay, kids, finish planting your poplars and get off to bed - or else Treebeard won't leave you those new bikes.") Why Christmas?
Well, I guess on the bright side, they haven't totally ruined Easter yet, and that holiday is more important, I think. To me, it seems like Thanksgiving would be a good time to give gifts. I mean, if Thanksgiving was started to give thanks for an abundant harvest, it seems like gift-giving would be nicely symbolic for the abundant overflow of crops by giving stuff from one person to another.
Better yet, why can't everybody just have two birthdays a year and spread the economic load out a bit?
Oh well. Happy New Year.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Weird Dream.
So, I'm in this large building which is either a college, my church, or a mall. There's some sort of reception going on, and a bunch of friends are there. I think sushi was served amongst the snacks. I think I may have seen Special Agent Fox Mulder (from The X-Files), but I definitely saw Special Agent Dana Scully (also from The X-Files), because she had been shot. She died right in front of me, and it was sad, so I cried, but I felt a little bit silly because everybody knows that Mulder and Scully are just ficticious characters from a TV show. At this point they both disappeared, or the dream cut to a different scene or something.
And so I've been assigned to this one room which had an open front to the main part of the mall. I think it was on the 3rd or 4th level. Oddly enough it was the same room where the first part took place. There were five other guys assigned to the room as well, whom I did not know. There were bunkbeds set up for us, but they decided it might be better to take the top ones down so everybody could have a bottom bunk. I had a tape measure and started to measure the size of the room to make sure they would fit, but they thought I was foolish to do so.
Then this girl I know from church comes by and says, "Scates, the Dollar Store on the first floor is having a sale on Mini-Mag Lights, and my floor is all out of flashlights, so we need to get some while they're on sale." I replied that my floor was also out, so we went to this guy (another friend from church) who was in charge of acquisitions, and he okayed our purchases.
So we went to go get the flashlights.
Labels: dreams
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
"From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
"From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back again into bondage."
(author unknown)
Labels: society
Monday, December 06, 2004
