DanaPellerin.com

Vacation! Yes my vacation starts today. 11 days of rest! OK, actually 11 days of hanging crown molding in the living room and working on my motorcycle, but to me that pretty much is rest. At least it has nothing to do with computers. So now that I’m enjoying my first day off, it actually feels a bit like Christmas.

And what an amazing time Christmas really is. It’s the one time in all of history when God actually steps foot on the Earth in human form and provides a way that we can be forgiven for our sins. This is so significant and I’m amazed that people don’t get it. We can be forgiven! What other world view or religion offers complete reconciliation with God? None that I know of. In most religions you just kind of have to be as good as you can and then hope when everything is tallied up you come out with enough brownie points. The bad part is you don’t know how many points you have, how many you need, or how much longer you have to earn them.

But in Jesus we have the God of the universe coming to Earth as a human, to live among us, to teach us, heal us, love us, experience life with us first hand, and ultimately to endure the horrible death of crucifixion in order to completely wipe our dirty slates clean. Give us unlimited points! Matthew 21 says “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

And so this is an incredible time of celebration. And what’s just as important is that it’s a time for ALL of us to celebrate. Christmas is not something that belongs to an organization, or a belief system, or a cultural group. Jesus came for ALL of mankind and that is something we so often forget. We’re so wrapped up in the traditions and that slogans and we spend so much time being offended by people saying Happy Kwanzaa that we forget the fact that Jesus came for all of us. He came for the Kwanzaa celebrators, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Sikhs, the plain old non-believer, and everyone else. Romans 3 says “Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too”.

So I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge this fantastic event we’re celebrating and to wish every single person out there a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I have a list of sites that I really like and every once in a while I’ll drop by them to see what’s new. One of these sites is YouVersion.com. YouVersion.com is a bible reading site that enables you to read the Bible in any translation, interact with other readers, bookmark or journal about your reading, etc. It’s an outstanding resource both from a practical and technical point of view.

Browsing the site today I found that they have added a really cool feature and so I wanted to blog about it. They’ve added the ability to use reading plans. If you’re not familiar with reading plans, they are basically a plan for reading the bible and there are many different plans depending on how you want to approach the Bible. Some focus on the New Testament, some focus on certain timelines, some are well balanced and cover various parts of the bible every day. Some are also based on time, so if you want to read the entire bible in 6 months or a year, you can if you follow the plan.

The bad part about plans is that they were mostly tied to a certain start date. So if you wanted to read the bible in a year you started on Jan 1 and finished on Dec 31. If you missed a day or two, you had to catch up or you screw up your plan and then it’s real easy to get lost.

YouVersion fixes this by adding check-off’s for each day you read. So now, rather than having certain readings tied to certain days, you just take them in order at your own pace. I’ve been wanting this type of feature since I totally failed at my “bible in a year” reading plan last year.

You can also use the mobile version of their website on your iPhone, so there’s more opportunity to read the Bible regardless of where you’re at.

Check out http://YouVersion.com

This is kind of a rough Christmas. My wife has been out of work for a year and a half after the construction company she worked for nearly went belly up. Since then she’s had maybe five interviews. Five. This is a woman with 20 years of bookkeeping and project management experience, and only five interviews in 18 months.

Today we found out that she got turned down for another job. This one only a part time position making less than half of what she made at her last full time job. It’s crushing and it’s a testament to how crappy the job situation really is in this country.

So she’ll continue looking. But it’s hard. We’re fine financially. We can’t do a lot of extra things, but we can pay the bills so I’m not complaining. But the mental and emotional toll is what’s hard. This is when you start questioning yourself. You start questioning where you’re going and what you’re doing and what you’re worth. And as a husband I not only have to carry the full burden of our finances, I also have to bear the burden of the emotional well being of my family. Self-pity and self doubt are evil things and can quickly paralyze. So it’s up to me to keep things positive and everyone motivated.

What really works on my psyche though is just wondering where God is in all of this. It’s really easy to just say everything’s in God’s hands. But in real life, when you are facing something that you honestly feel is important for very valid reasons, and yet it’s just not happening for you… it really starts to work on you.

There’s a song I like, and honestly I don’t even really know or care what the song is really about, but there’s one line that says “What if God doesn’t care?”. And if there’s a chink in my armor of faith, it’s that thought. What if the things we think are important just aren’t important to God? What if they just don’t matter one way or the other?

And so this is where my faith gets confused. I always hear people say that God is leading them into one line of work or another and then they fail fantastically. And I just wonder, really? Was God really leading you to that collosal failure? Or did you just have this grand dream on your own and God really didn’t have an opinion one way or the other?

I don’t want to sound like I’m having a major failure of faith because my wife hasn’t found a job. That’s not the case. There’s two things I believe are true; that God loves us, and that God is in complete and absolute control. But my problem is learning to accept the fact that my plans aren’t always in line with God’s plans, and even though sometimes God’s plans can feel a whole lot like indifference, I need to believe that ultimately his plan will be better than anything I could have made for myself.

My posts here have been kind of slacking. There’s just not that much going on. Summer is winding down, it’s starting to cool off, winter is fast approaching and I’m sure I’ll be dropping into my sunshine deficient depression any day now. I really dislike the winter time.

However, there are some things to talk about; Journey. Yep, the band from the bay that we all love, or love to hate. Personally, I love them. I think they rock. Not in the bang your skull against a brick wall kind of rock that I normally dig, but more of a feel good, get in your Pontiac Trans-Am with T-Tops and crank the cassette deck while driving real fast with your feathered hair girlfriend kind of rock.

OK, when Journey was huge I wasn’t old enough to drive a Firebird, or have a girlfriend with feathered hair. But my brother did, and he loved Journey, and I looked up to him, so that’s the image that pops into my head whenever I listen to them.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because our band is rocking Journey songs every weekend for the month of October. And where are we rocking said songs? Church. Yes, we are rocking Journey songs at church, which honestly, I think is the coolest thing on the planet.

Let’s face it, hymns are cool. Acoustic guitar sing alongs have their place….. ok maybe not…. but anyway, to the non-christian walking into church, those things are kind of creepy. Why? Because nobody in the everyday world sings hymns or does accoustic sing alongs! We’re rocking out in the real world, man! So this gives us the opportunity to give people something familiar. Make them feel welcome. And it also helps us old rockers get our rock fix.

So I’m on the schedule this weekend. The band and I will be busting out “Anyway You Want It” and our pastor is going to continue his fantastic series of talks on navigating through tough times. It’s going to be a great weekend at Clovis Hills Church.

I thought this was an excellent post over at StuffChristiansLike.com.

Enjoy.

[Click Here]

! UPDATE !

It’s all about serving today. Paul just posted an awesome video from Sunday’s service.

[Click here to check it out]