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

Goodbye Tomatoes and Peppers

When I take the trash out this morning, I'm going to say goodbye to my tomatoes and peppers. It was 28 degrees out this morning--a bit too cold for them. Another year, another lesson not learned.

One lesson that I hope we learn from the teaching this morning is this: People are dying and going to hell. There is an absolute distinction between those who walk in the light and those who walk in the darkness. The final antithesis will come when Jesus separates the sheep from the goats...there will be no more chances to change your mind. Our agenda needs to be that of presenting the gospel to the lost. May the Lord be glorified in this!

Today's Salad

Today is March 28th, 2009. (Which, coincidentally is my mother's birthday. She passed away about 22 years ago at the age of 51. I am now 53 years old myself. )

This is the first real harvest of the Spring. We have eaten a few green onions, but today we will have a full salad from our small home garden. Out of view are some mint sprigs boiling in (filtered) water for ice tea. I am pretty much always thankful to the Lord for His provision; but, am generally more emotional about it when it comes directly from our garden. "Thank you Lord of the harvest for this beginning meal, through which we remember your ever-constant provision for us...Amen."

A Few Spring Pictures

1. Onions, garlic, spinach, broccoli, and day lilies are going strong.
2. The lettuce is ready for us to start picking and eating.
3. If you enlarge the picture of our main sidewalk, you will see a fire-ant bed that began a few days ago.
4. This is a picture of our Lady Banks Rose. It will be in full bloom for about two weeks. We have to trim about 3-4 feet off of it every year so that we can get through the gate. It harbors a variety of birds year round.

Let God be God

I believe that God will turn the "bad things" that happen to Christians to good in His Kingdom. I believe that He is omnipotent and good. I believe that He "allows" bad things to happen in the world. I believe that he is able to bring glory to Himself through all of this. I believe this through faith.

I am going to start teaching at our local body next Sunday. This is the first topic that I am going to deal with...by faith. I, however, was almost overwhelmed at one point last week by the pain and suffering revealed to me:

1. The brother of one of my students was suddenly diagnosed with Stage 4 (very bad) cancer
2. One of my student's wife kicked him out and is selling her body for drug money (there is a 1-year old baby involved)
3. One of my students told me that she has been fainting sporadically for a few weeks and that the doctor wants to do an MRI on her brain (last Friday)
4. Another student emailed he that he could not make it to class because he was having a biopsy done the next day (last Friday)
5. Someone else just (during Spring Break) had her inner ear operated on to "fix" her ear-bones (she is a wonderful singer)...she is doing well, b-t-w
6. Another had his best friend killed in a motorcycle crash last month
7. One of our AWANA students has gone from being a blessing to a curse...we love her

Scripture says that the Word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. We are generally only able to see that one step ahead...we don't have the Big Picture. I feel that I usually don't even have the little picture! Praise the Lord that we have Someone who has both the Big and Little Pictures down pat. We don't want to turn into practical deists.

Look, there is pain an suffering...I just hit the tip of the iceberg of what goes on around me all the time. Also, I'm not willing to call bad good.

There is a good answer to all of this; however, we still only see in a mirror dimly.