Chris's Musings

For everyone that's been praying for my family... no pictures of our stuff yet (I think my parents may have taken some... I'll check) but we (the collective we... I'm just using my cell phone) survived the storm and the damage was relatively minimal compared to some of the desolation that you may have seen in Galveston and Surfside on the news. My parents ventured to Lake Jackson to check out the house yesterday and found that there is a lot of debris in the yard, one tree down but it didn't hit anything valuable, and the power is still out. I suppose that yesterday was spent cleaning out the refrigerator from the 4+ day old food that has been sitting in there and making for a good petri dish. I didn't ask about the freezer petri dish, but I'm sure it's getting cleared out as well. They were spending the night at the house, living by candle light, and today is likely going to be a lot of debris cleanup... my dad is going to get to pull out his chainsaw a...

Hurricane Ike is bearing down and scheduled to hit on Friday evening... Probably will be a Cat-3 or maybe a Cat-4. My parents and youngest brother are in Mandatory Evacuation zones... fortunately they're telling me that the traffic on the evacuation routes is much better than they were during Hurricane Rita in 2005. Keep Texas in your prayers. :-)

Lyrics: In this farewell, There is no blood There is no alibi Cause I've drawn regret From the truth Of a thousands lies So let mercy come and wash away What I've Done I'll face myself To cross out what I've become Erase myself and let go of what I've done Put to rest, What you thought of me Well, I clean this slate With the hands, Of uncertainty So let mercy come, And Wash away What I've Done I'll face myself Tto cross what I've become Erase myself And let go of what I've done For what I've done I start again And whatever pain may come Today this ends I'm forgiving what I've done I'll face myself To cross out what I've become Erase myself And let go of what I've done What I've Done What I've Done Forgetting what I've done

Well, my friends... to answer my last post... Barracuda hit a home run! For those that don't know, Barracuda Sarah was Sarah Palin's nickname playing high school basketball. We could see last night how she earned that nickname with toughness, tenacity, and NO FEAR. Way to go John McCain for picking her. Well, if you think that Barracuda's nomination for Maverick's running mate got people talking, you should have waited for her speech. Apparently a lot of people in the liberal media have been working overtime to discredit, marginalize, and destroy her, and instead of backing down and letting them get away with all that crap, she went after them.. and kept going after them... and then went after their golden boy Barack Obama. Not with the kind of character assassination that we hate in politics, but with a fact-based comparison of his experience base and hers... and that got people talking. The one thing that got people talking the most was the line about "well...

Way to go, John McCain, for turning the political world on its head and stealing press time from Barak Obama :-).  I leave for Labor Day Retreat to find out who the Maverick picked to be his running mate for 2008... a little known Alaskan Governor by the name of Sarah Palin .  My first response was:  HUH?  Who is she?  Wait a minute, a Republican picked a "she?"  Now, this IS John McCain that we're talking about (the Maverick is his own man, why would he follow the conventional Republican "wisdom"), so the fact that he made an unconventional pick didn't surprise me... but I was still wondering "what the heck?"   So, on the way to LDR , I had a chance to read up on what was being said about her and her history on the NY Times iPhone site... I started to warm up to her (as if I was anti-SP in the first place, I just didn't have a clue who she is yet)... hunts and skins moose, husband owns a commercial fishing business, five kids (self-professed...

Back from Labor Day Retreat, managing to keep from being sunburned and bowled over by Hurricane Gustav, I am enjoying a quiet evening relaxing and mulling over some of the happenings and ways that God had been speaking to me over the weekend.  This weekend has been great in that regard... God has used Brennan Manning (our speaker, author of The Ragamuffin Gospel) to really speak into my life and has obviously left me with a lot to noodle over.   I'll share with you one of those things... something that I thought was really interesting. In one of his talks, Brennan turned around and talked about Jesus's famous parable of the prodigal son as if when He was talking about the character of the prodigal, think about it as if Jesus was characterizing himself as the "prodigal."  This is, in my mind, very scandalous... considering that Jesus IS the perfect Son of God and I'm not really thinking at all that the parable's character was necessarily intended to be Jesus.....