Christmas

Christmas for me is different this year. Somewhere over the last year it changed from being a holiday based on a children's story, to a celebration of one of the single most fantastic events in history.

It's like when you realize that the story of Daniel in the lion's den is not a child's story, but the story of a man on death row, sentenced to the electric chair. And on the day of his execution the electricity, by some miracle, passed through him without harming him. You realize that the stories are of men and women, not children or cartoons.

The story is coming alive to me. It's incredible. It's the story of probably the most humiliating and loving acts in History. God, the creator of the universe, more powerful than I can even begin to comprehend, above everything, gave it all up, and became human, and not a king living in all the comfort that money can afford, commanding around people to serve Him, but born to a tradesman and his fiance, born to serve others. And he wasn't born in a bed, in the comfort of a home. He was born in a barn, where animals lived, and crapped.

But even though he was born in the lowest of circumstances, it couldn't stop the earth, His creation, from recognizing Him. His birth was attended by royalty as well as outcasts of society. He was given gifts for royalty. The sky worshiped Him with a star. And all the while he slept in a feeding trough.

My king was born in a stable. That's about as down to earth as you can get I think. It's a pretty sweet lesson in love through humility too.

So, for those of you that don't know and haven't been updated, I'm working at Wildwood Ranch nowadays. I'm participating in an internship/discipleship program. It's good.

Part of my work here is to feed the horses on Fridays. I enjoy doing that a lot.

Today I was feeding the horses, and one of them decided to pee. I'm sorry if this grosses some of you out, but they're animals, it's what animals do. Anyways, I looked over when I heard the sound of a fountain and Lady was peeing. But something was wrong, she wasn't peeing right, she was peing from under her tail, not under her belly! My first reaction was to tell her she was doing it wrong, but that's not too good since #1, horses can't understand english, #2 She was right, and I was wrong. She's a girl. Apparently for the many many hours I've been around horses in my life, I've never seen a female one pee, or at least don't remember.

I find that a lot of the time, my instinctual reaction to anything, is "I'm right and you're wrong." I'm fairly argumentative and a lot of the time it's about stupid stuff. People get irritated with me about this. Many times I am right, which probably doesn't help the situation. I Pride myself in my ability to diagnose and figure out things better than most people. People don't like prideful people. I'm prideful there. God doesn't like a prideful spirit. I'm prideful.

I'm going to start asking God to help me with humility. Maybe it is possible for the world to go around the sun without my direction. :)

It's funny how God can use a peeing horse to point out my pride in me, to me.

Hey everybody, I'm back!

Camp was amazing I'll talk more about that later though. Hopefully.

Exciting news! I bought a motorcycle! It's a 1982 Yamaha 750 seca.

When I bought it about 4 days ago it had a bit of engine trouble, it wouldn't idle nicely and didn't have as much power as I thought it should have. Over the weekend I worked on it. I was expecting the worst and was expecting to have to rebuild the carbs but decided on just changing the spark plugs and adjusting the fuel mixture first. The old plugs were very fouled and it was amazing that it ran. I changed the plugs. Adjusted the fuel mixture and now it runs very well. In fact, I can't get the idle slow enough so I'm going to have to take it apart again and see if I can fix that when I get another chance to work on it in a few days.

I'm working on getting my motorcycle endorsment. As soon as I take the road test and get that I'll be driving the bike until it's too cold.

I'll put a picture up soon. Xanga is not cooperating and I have to get going.

So I'm starting training for the camp I'll be working at for the summer today. I'll be leaving this afternoon around 2:30ish, and will be done around Aug 18th at which point I will be going to Chapter Focus Week.

My limited blog postings will probably be more limited over the summer, but maybe I'll write some. I will have limited access to a computer.

If you're interested in contacting me, I'll have limited access to a computer and you can e-mail me, I may be slow in returning anything though. Or I'll have my phone which will be off most of the time but I'll be checking it daily probably. That'll probably be the quicker way to contatct me. If there is a really urgent message, then you can call the camp at the number on their website and have them get me.

I hope everybody has a great summer. I'll hopefully be posting a few bits here throughout summer so check every once in a while.