Gold and Silver: An Admonition (to myself)

I have "Our Daily Bread" as my homepage so that I can do their 'Bible In One Year' program. This morning, for the NT portion, the Scripture reading was Luke 12. Luke 12:13-21 caught my attention:

Luk 12:13 And one of the company said to him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me.
Luk 12:14 And he said to him, Man, who made me a judge, or a divider over you?
Luk 12:15 And he said to them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.
Luk 12:16 And he spoke a parable to them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:
Luk 12:17 And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to deposit my fruits?
Luk 12:18 And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I deposit all my fruits and my goods.
Luk 12:19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast abundance of goods laid up for many years; take thy ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
Luk 12:20 But God said to him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?
Luk 12:21 So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich towards God.

The reason it caught my attention is because I have been reading a book titled, Guide to Investing in Gold and Silver, by Michael Maloney. I am interested in investing in gold and silver (Without the means to do so in a significant way!) and have found the book an excellent primer on the precious metals market. I also am in the midst of teaching an Investment Analysis course and thought to implement some of the material this semester.

It's clear to me that I can sometimes do the right thing for wrong reasons. It's certainly not wrong to plan or prepare for the future. God wants us to provide for and take care of our families, our brothers/sisters in Christ, and others less fortunate that we come in contact with. But, I want to be careful not to allow my possessions to take hold of me:

Deu 8:18 But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he swore to thy fathers, as it is this day.
Deu 8:19 And it shall be, if thou shalt at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish.

Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you. Thank you Lord for this admonition to me!

Amazing!

This morning (at church) I am going to talk about the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am going to begin the teaching by showing a picture of and talking about our compost pile. What a simple thing--put some organic material in a pile, add water, and it will eventually turn back into "dirt."

We put a variety of items in our compost pile: Leaves, grass, weeds, plants, kitchen waste, coffee grounds and filters, egg shells, etc. All of these things eventually turn into "dirt" which we then place back upon the garden. This dirt, of course, is full of biological life (redundant, eh?). Again, I want to reiterate that the turning of organic material into dirt is quite easy--throw the stuff in , mix it a bit if you want to, add some water, wait a bit, and "bingo"-->you have dirt (humus).

Easy, easy, easy--we've done this for years.

I am truly amazed at the technological progress that we have had in my lifetime. My first PC didn't have any storage at all--it all went on the floppy disk. In 1987 I purchased my first hard-drive, 20MB for $200! This was the penultimate purchase...it couldn't get much better than this! This morning I am going to carry a 2 GB flash drive in my pocket that I purchased for $9.00 sometime last year. It has 100 times the storage capacity of my first hard drive at about 1/22nd of the cost. I have seen 64 GB flash drives at the store. I am not being sarcastic (though I could be), I really am impressed with our gains in computer technology.

Back to the compost pile...

With all of our gains in technology, if you asked a group of top scientists to turn back the process in my compost pile and turn a little, itty, tiny bit of it back into one original leaf they would say, "Preposterous, impossible, inconceivable, unprecedented, etc!!!!!" Can't be done! We can send a man to the moon (or can we?) but we can't re-create one leaf that has been through the composting experience.

How then can we say that we understand the concept of the resurrection?

The people in Christ' day were much closer to the earth than we are. They saw the "circle of life" process on a daily basis in their lives...death, change, life. Jesus told them that He had to die and be born again. He showed them that it was possible by resurrecting Lazarus from the dead (Lazarus had been "composting" for four days). Still, they truly had no concept of bodily resurrection, whereby something dead was fully reanimated. Dead "stuff" turned into dirt, was mixed back into the soil, and was used to begin the process of life again. How could it be reanimated back to the same thing that it was before? When they saw the empty tomb, they ALL thought that the Romans had just moved His body.

Ok, ok, ok...the point is this: We can't reanimate one simple leaf that has been turned back into dirt. Let's don't think that we really understand this resurrection thing. We really are just familiar with the conoept. When you meditate on the resurrection of Jesus it eventually should make your head swim--the God who raised Jesus from the dead can take/find all of the molecules that make up your body and put them back together again--no matter how far they are scattered across the universe. Perhaps a Christian Dr. McCoy wouldn't have feared having his atoms scattered across the universe via a transporter (original Star Trek analogy)?

Coffee Anyone?

Full City Roast (Just after the Second Crack)












My wife and I like good coffee. Not vending machine coffee and not coffee that looks like ice tea. This post is not for you if you think that instant coffee is a real drink or that brewing coffee out a can is where it's at.

I looked at some alternative prices for real coffee (Hint: It doesn't come in a can!). Below is what I discovered:

1). Coffee at our local coffee shop: $18.00 per pound
2). Starbucks coffee (whole bean at Walmart): 10.60 per pound
3). Green beans for roasting at Dean's Beans (online): 5.73 per pound

Admittedly, you would have to purchase 15 lbs. of green beans to get this average price per pound. This DOES include the shipping cost per pound. B-T-W, green beans will store for a year without going bad.

OK, so you have to have a way to roast the beans. Roasting your own beans, of course, is both quite easy and enables you to 'cook' them to your specification. We have had an inexpensive home roaster for over five years. Also, you can easily roast green coffee beans in a hot air popcorn popper. We did that for everal years before buying the roaster.

The smell of fresh roasting coffee beans is an olfactory delight. The smell of Organic Green Nicaraguan Coffee roasting can really make your mouth water. I prefer the dark end of a full-city roast, myself.

Oops, I got ahead of myself!

The point is, if you like real coffee, it is much more economical to purchase green coffee beans and do the roasting yourself. You can roast it to your own specifications and save considerably. This would be the value-added side of production: Taking a product/service and adding something to it to improve its value. I.e., roasting your own coffee instead of paying someone else to do it for you. It's quite pleasurable and saves you about 45% of the cost of buying pre-roasted Starbucks coffee (which is quite good, b-t-w!).

Look for me out in my front yard over the Easter break drinking a fresh cup of coffee...I'll put on a pot for all of us (Chemex, of course! :)).

SIFE Regional Competition

Well, we're off this morning for our SIFE regional competition up in downtown Dallas. SIFE stands for Students in Free Enterprise. Our mission is to take the message of free enterprise to our school, our community, and to the globe. We really do try and take a Christian slant on free enterprise.

The competition is about presenting the various projects that the teams did over this past year. Broad categories include market economics, personal finance, sustainability, ethics, etc.

Our SIFE team did over ten different projects this year and will be presenting them to a group of 16-24 judges. We will be competing against 6-7 other teams in our tier. There will be over 60 colleges representing a six-state region.

Free enterprise will fail, men will fail, but the Word of our Lord will remain forever.
Amen