A New Beginning

For your enjoyment, some really cool background music.

Finally, I've gotten around to posting after over month of what feels like inaction. Since dead week, I just haven't felt all that alive. I still feel drained physically and mentally, but I'm thankful that God has still sustained me. A couple thoughts before I go to bed. (No New Year's Eve celebration for me. Holidays are the same as any other day to me anyways. Heck, I didn't even have proper Christmas, what with driving down to Disneyland with family on Christmas Day and me and my parents nearly having an argument over whether I should go to church that Sunday and waste the Disneyland ticket. God is gracious and gave us peace.)

God hunts his children down when we get out of line. I think I was blessed to find a great Phillip Yancey book, The Bible Jesus Read on a library shelf last week. See, the past couple of months I had been on an endeavor to memorize the Gospel of John. Lately, though, it had been a real chore; I got to the point where I seemed to lose the heart to keep doing it. I learned the root of this problem through the book--I had been inadvertently, yet deliberately avoiding the Old Testament in my quiet times by devoting so much time to memorizing. And there I was thinking I was pleasing God with my feeble attempts at interacting with His Word. It's not that memorizing is a bad thing. I just think it's best to hold off on that until I get more acquainted with God through the OT, the part of God's Word that Yancey believes is more essential to our understanding of the New Testament than even the New Testament itself. It's time for me to return to my true love, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Israel, and delve into God's love of His people back in the day. As Yancey points out, the OT is the Bible Jesus read, the prayers He prayed, the songs He sang, and the topics He taught. I hope that going through the OT again will remind and teach me of who God is, and at the same time, teach me who Jesus is.

I couldn't care less about what a calendar tells me tomorrow. I know how a lot of people see New Year's Day as a new beginning, a chance to do something better, a chance to let things go. But really, that's the everyday for me, and I'm looking forward to "New Year's Day" every day, every waking moment. Just my 2 cents.


I am excited as heck to observe my first Lent this year. For those who don't know, Lent is a period of time before Easter that we give something up to God that we could do without in preparation for Easter. It's not something we have to do. Still, I think it would be a great incentive for pruning something that we should anyways. And no one says once Lent is over we stop our sacrifice, right? :) Anyone who wants to join me, Ash Wednesday is February 17, 2010!

I think I'm done for this year. I'm going to bed.
As the animated animals who don't belong to Disney say, "That's all, folk's!"