Coming Back Stronger

My youngest daughter gave this to me for my birthday and I am thoroughly enjoying this book. Injuries, defects, mental breakdowns and mistakes are some of the best ways to learn how to keep pressing on toward a goal.

A pure heart, talent, support and blessing are rare in professional athletes because of the way we Americans worship them. It takes great love and discipline for God to develop character in a super bowl quarterback from Texas.

Reading about athletics and humanity has its limitations, but this is inspiring.  I recommend this book and have given it to a few friends to read when it seems like everything is going bad and the potential is there for it to get worse.

Favorite Quotes from Drew in the book:

• The road to success is usually a pretty bumpy one. And there are no shortcuts. 
• The painful things we go through have a way of teaching us things we can't learn any other way.
• It's not always the first-round picks who rise to the top. It's often the journeyman, the ones who persevere through trials. 
• I believe that when you fear God, you don't need to fear anything else---no man, no task, no obstacle or challenge.
• My goal for each year is simple: to be better than I was the year before.... by digging deep and evaluating yourself. 

25th Anniversary

Jackie and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary this week.  It is really hard to believe that it has been 25 years. Time doesn't really seem to matter much anymore as it passes so quickly.

A friend from Japan just contacted me this week and I realized that he had taken me on a tour through the southern part of Tokyo before Jackie and I were blessed with our oldest daughter.  That tour seems like it was just yesterday, another reminder that time passes quickly.

A friend from work was married just this past Saturday reminding me that the duration of a marriage is not nearly as significant as the foundation of the marriage.

As I am writing this, our three children are all at youth camp in Hardin, KY.  They are spending time with some people that we have known and trusted for many years to teach absolute truth from an eternal perspective.

I am proud of all three children as they are making choices that will affect the rest of their lives, just like Jackie and I do every day.

In the scope of all things eternal, 25 years is really just a fleeting moment.  My prayer is that our children will be able to understand holy matrimony way better than we do one day.  Jackie and I have friends that can appreciate this without ever being married to anyone but Jesus Christ.

Jackie and I were blessed to have been raised by families that understand words like love, faith and hope and how a relationship with Jesus Christ and accountability within a community can make 50th Wedding Anniversaries as achievable as 25th Wedding Anniversaries.

As we celebrate for a few days looking back 25 and forward 25, the  time that seems most significant is now.  That has always been the case for the two of us, for better or for worse.

We are planning to meet our children in Louisville at a wedding that is significant to all of us.  As Josh and I have been meeting this past few months, we have been touched on the difference between the titles of bride and wife.  They are both significant.

Approaching a wedding or an anniversary or just another day, a marriage has just as much need for bride and groom as it does man and woman or husband and wife.

Your God Is Too Small

When Jackie and I left Charlotte, NC for the opportunities that awaited us in Lexington, KY, my Sunday School teacher gave me a book that he thought I would enjoy.  I read it immediately and appreciate Tommie Mull for giving it to me.

In 1989, I thought the perspective was timeless because J.B. Phillips was writing down truths in 1961 that were relevant to the events and technology of 1989.

On a recent hiking trip in NC, I decided to re-read this book and have determined it still to be timeless in 2011.

C.S. Lewis wrote the Screwtape Letters to help us see how demons are restricted, limited in scope, and how their tactics to speak to us from time to time in the first person as though they were us.  A fictional piece that aligned with the truth.

J.B. Phillips works from a different direction.  He lists several destructive views of God that we have created in our own finite minds that keep us from understanding the limitlessness of God.  Those views are often a result of good experiences with people that have been inspiring and helpful to us.

I'll list a few of those destructive associations that we have made between a limitless God and a limited image of God.

• Resident Policeman
• Parental Hangover
• Grand Old Man
• Meek and Mild
• Absolute Perfection
• Heavenly Bosom
• God-in-a-box
• Managing Director
• Second-Hand God
• Perennial Grievance
• Pale Galilean
• Projected Image
• Assorted

The Myths of Innovation

A friend at work recommended I read this.

Enjoyed the first chapter that suggested that epiphanies are things we look for, hope for and believe in but are rare, and usually embellishments of reality because people want to believe them, and therefore not a good source of innovation.

I have to respect an author that is emphatic about getting his readers to put down all books and make something with their hands in the same book that includes a 100 book bibliography rank ordered by frequency of reference.

A God Sized Promise

Dustin and Mindi were married in a beautiful ceremony that represented a God sized promise.

Pastor Dave shared an encouraging charge about the details of accessories, recipes and life together as family.  Details tie us all together as they are woven together and prepared in a tasteful manner.

No one can know what God has in store for us as His children.  The Martins and the Matterns certainly have traveled a path that no man expected for them even though the final destination is clear and full of lots of joy.

In addition to the ceremony, it was good to see so many people from the community that I had not seen in a very long time.

It was also good for our family to be able to all go together to the wedding.  Lots of details there to be woven.

MC Escher: Waterfall

One of my hobbies is to put together 1,000 piece black and white MC Escher puzzles because it just seems like a hard thing to do.  MC Escher's work has always intrigued me because of his ability to tie two dimensional art with engineering and physics and visual trickery.

A friend sent me this video and I am so disappointed with myself for not having tried something like this before....



To make up for not thinking about this on my own, I'm thinking I need to do this in a larger scale.

Favorite movies we all watched in 2010

In order to make this list, all five Ebys must have seen this movie during the year it is nominated. Half the movies that were nominated by individual Ebys were disqualified because they were not viewed by all of us.


Here is the list for 2010:

1. Unstoppable ( One #1 vote )
2. Toy Story 3 ( One #1 vote )
3. Knight & Day
4. Bounty Hunter
5. The Tourist
6. Shutter Island
7. The Box
8. Eat, Pray, Love

There were five disqualified movies that were ranked higher than any of our qualified movies.

• ( Receiving #1 votes )
  The A-Team, The Book of Eli, Date Night
  We all know that Adam would have liked A-Team, but he didn't see it...
• ( Receiving #2 votes )
  The Social Network, Secretariat
  Adam thinks we all would have liked The Social Network, but none of us saw it..

The Tourist was the movie with the greatest spread of votes ranging for #4 to #14.

The worst movies tend to get seen by all of us since Red Box has made it so cheap to watch movies.   We are watching these movies at least 28 days later than all of our friends that are watching better movies sooner with Netflix, Cable or Satellite.