Archive for 'General'
Energy Efficient Bulbs??
Posted on March 13, 2008, under General.
Check your bulbs if you use ‘em. I found brown tinting on two others. Don’t know what to make of that yet, but I will be calling the customer service number on them. Holy cow.
Looking forward to 2007
The year 2006 held many changes for my home, but good friends and family are a constant blessing through the ups-and-downs. I look forward to 2007 with my old friends and the new ones I’ve made this year.
IEBlog details the CSS changes for IE7
The IEBlog outlines the list of CSS changes and standards enhancements coming in IE 7. The rendering fixes/changes will be triggered by the DOCTYPE served up by the web page. To handle the rendering differences between versions of IE browsers, the recommendation is to serve differing CSS via conditional statements.
I’m thinking about starting over.
It’s been on my mind for awhile, but I’m seriously considering dropping my current blog engine and starting over in WordPress.
What did you do this weekend?
Cornhusker State Games 2006: Adventure Race
Christmas Thanks
This Christmas, I am thankful for..
- A challenging job at a growing company who cares about people.
- Good friends, whom I can trust and laugh with.
- Family who cares for one another.
- A wonderful daughter who steals more of my heart every day.
- My wife who loves me inspite of myself, and whom I wouldn’t trade for anyone.
- Most of all, I am thankful for God, choosing to come to earth as a baby, to pour out his earthly life in love, that I might find forgiveness and friendship with my Creator – for all of eternity.
Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before God made anything at all and is supreme over all creation. Christ is the one through whom God created everything in heaven and earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see – kings, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities. Everything has been created through him and for him. He existed before everything else began, and he holds all creation together.
Christ is the head of the church, which is his body. He is the first of all who will rise from the dead, so he is first in everything. For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and by him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of his blood on the cross. This includes you who were once so far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions, yet now he has brought you back as his friends. He has done this through his death on the cross in his own human body. As a result, he has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.
Colossians 1:15-22, NLT
Debt is dumb!
I’ve been reading the book The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. This is the first personal finance book I’ve actually enjoyed reading! Mr. Ramsey is a great author and his passion for good money management shines through the book as a he deals with serious subjects in a practical, but enjoyable way. I would say the most enjoyable chapter so far has been the one dispelling common myths about using debt and trying to ‘game’ the system for personal gain. It’s well worth the read, in my opinion.
So we are now working our way to being debt free. We plan to have all our debt (including both cars), except the mortgage, paid off in 2006. Then, we’ll build up our savings from there and keep working on the “7 Baby Steps” path:
7 Baby Steps
- $1,000 to start an Emergency Fund
- Pay off all debt using the Debt Snowball
- Three to six months of expenses in savings
- Invest 15 percent of household income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement
- College funding for children
- Pay off home early
- Build wealth and give! Invest in mutual funds and real estate
Gaining personal wealth isn’t complicated, it just takes self-discipline and work. The great part about Dave Ramsey’s show is that he helps you have a fun time doing it.
You can catch the “Dave Ramsey Show” on your local radio station, listen online, or subscribe to the 1-hour podcast.
The security of heaven and the love of God
(The following is a short presentation I gave in El Salvador)
We have come to tell those of you who may not know, that God loves you and He created you to have a personal relationship with Him. However there is a problem. Sin separates us from God.
When we flew from the United States to come to El Salvador, we had to go through airport security. The airport security has us pass through X-ray machines and metal detectors. We couldn’t get through if we were carrying bad things. Obviously carrying guns and big knives will stop us at security, but one small, hidden item will stop us as well. We can’t get into the plane with what security has determined as bad things.
This is like our relationship with God. God can have nothing to do with bad things. No bad things are allowed into heaven.
You may carry in your past a lot of bad things. You may have a lot of regret and sadness in your heart. You may feel you have no hope. You can feel the separation between us and God. In your heart, you know it is there.
Maybe you haven’t done a lot of bad things in your life. You don’t have much regret in your heart. The truth is, the Bible says you are as far from God as someone who has many bad things. In fact, if we have a rebellious attitude towards God, we are ‘bad things’.
Heaven is perfect. God is perfect. Only perfect people can have a personal relationship with God. This leaves us with no hope! We are not perfect. We are in trouble.
God, in His goodness, saw our problem. Even though He did not need to, out of His love, He came to our rescue. God came down to Earth as Jesus. Jesus, because he was God, lived a perfect life. Because Jesus lived a perfect life, he could make a choice to help.
Bad things, “sin”, requires punishment, it requires justice. Jesus, who was without sin, chose out of love to take our sins upon himself. He chose to take our punishment for our sins. He did this by dying a horrible, shame-filled death on the cross. We deserved that punishment and death, but he took it for us. Because his death covered our sins, he now offers us forgiveness.
Think of it like the security at the airport. Jesus, who had nothing of concern to the security, went through for us. We would set off the security of heaven no matter what we did, because we carry our sin and we can’t remove it ourselves. But Christ made a way, by taking our punishment for us. He went in our place on the cross, so that, by acknowledging that replacement, we now have a free path to God.
God now sees us through the sacrifice and life of His son, Jesus. Because Jesus traded places with us, God now sees us as blameless. We no longer set off the security alarms of heaven, and are able to fellowship with our loving God, because of His saving us through Jesus Christ
It cost money to go from Nebraska to El Salvador, but as an example of God’s love for us, Jesus’s sacrifice costs you nothing. All you must do is believe, accept, and trust that Jesus Christ died a sacrificial death in your place, so that you might live with Him forever. That’s it. It’s your choice.
I invite you now to tell God, I am a sinner. I don’t deserve a perfect God or heaven. But thank you for sending Jesus in my place, so that I might experience your love, and have eternal life.
Thank you God, for your forgiveness and for your love for me.
A follower first; A leader second
Many who take courses in leadership in the hope of attaining it fail because they have never learned to follow.
Spiritual Leadership, by J. Oswald Sanders, © 1967, page 44
This is a great book.
Happy Easter Sunday!
He was handed over to die because of our sins, and he was raised from the dead to make us right with God.
Romans 4:25, New Living Translation
