Who do we pray to?

Sometimes when people pray, I hear them pray to God. That's great. Sometimes I hear people pray to Jesus. That's cool. And sometimes I hear people pray to the Holy Spirit. And I wonder... are we supposed to pray to the Holy Spirit. We are to pray in the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:26), but do we pray TO the Holy Spirit. Technically, the three are one. But still... do we address the Holy Spirit directly when we pray? I think about this from time to time, but I've never taken the time to investigate.

Back to School

It's the end of the summer, so you know its time. School is back. With a vengence. As of August 15th, I owed Trinity like $4,000 for last spring. So I wasn't planning on going back. Then comes August 16th and I find out that one of my relatives planned to help out with the money. God doesn't provide late. But He doesn't provide early, either. I actually didn't know if I should go back to school, with everything that's going on with my family, ya know. But here I am. Thursday, September 2nd, enrolled in school, a week of class gone. As of right now, I'm not positive if going to school was the right choice or not. I'll know in about 2 months. I know this semester will prove to be one of the toughest semesters of my life... maybe I should just say busiest.

Class List: Pentateuch, Life of Christ, Elementary Greek, Pauline Epistles

Book List: Handbook on Pentateuch (Hamilton), Basics of Biblical Greek: Grammar (Mounce), basics of Biblical Greek Workbook (Mounce), Jesus the Messiah (Stein), Jesus I Never Knew (Yancey), Writings of New Testament (Johnson), Paul's Letter Collection (Trobish), Paul (Wright), In Praise of the Inexpressible: Paul's (Paillard).

"Remember Me"

What gods do I serve? Really an easier question would be which gods don't I serve. I'm a slave to the seven deadly sins. And then I'm a slave to a thousand false gods.

In the Old Testament, people go astray when they forget. The simple truth is I forget too. I forget all the time. Everyday.

Right now after reading God's words to me, I feel loved by Him, I feel love for Him. Right now I want to serve and worship him. But in 30 minutes when I forget about God's heart for me, then I will not want to serve Him.

I don't want that to happen. I pray that I remember God.

Summer

Is it just me or is this summer flying by unbelievably fast? I blinked at June was gone. There were a couple things I wanted to start this summer and haven't been able to because I've been so busy doing other things. I need to shift some priorities around for sure.

It's definitely been weird being at home without Jeremy, Jesse, or my Dad. But now Jesse's back home, so that should spice things up a bit.

This summer I had a few things I wanted to do, and some things I have done, some things I haven't done so well at so far:

• Spend time with Faith
• Go to Six Flags
• Go to SBR
• Start a Bible study with my family.
• Do my email bible study
• Clean and organize garage and basement
• Do a personal computer tutor for Greek
• Pay off my credit cards
• Lose a bit of weight
• Repair some things around the house.

Check in later to see if I've improved.

Rules

I recently got a ticket for not wearing my seat belt. It cost me $55 for the ticket at $8 for a cashier's check (because the city doesn't trust personal checks I guess). Obviously I wasn't too happy about that. I almost would have preferred if I got a speeding ticket. Why? Because I think the seat belt law is dumb.

You see, I have no problem following rules that make sense to me. It's when there's rules that I don't understand or I think are dumb that I don't follow. For instance, it makes sense that not speeding is a good rule to follow because you are endangering other people (I don't always follow the rule, but I think it's a rule that should be enforced). It's a good rule not to drink bleach...because it will kill you. It's a good rule to clean your bathroom every week... because it gets frickin nasty if you don't. It's simple. I follow rules that I get.

Maybe not all people agree with my logic about which rules are right, but I think the idea behind it is true for most people: follow rules that make sense.

For years I've wondered why I repeatedly fail at reading my bible and having a real prayer life. I'm beginning to think those are rules that don't make sense to me. After all, my life is pretty easy most of the time. Pretty stressless. Why do I need Jesus when my life is going fine, or when I am completely capable of handling the problems in my life? Why do I need to read the bible or pray? Why do I need Jesus now?

And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.

1 Thes. 5:14-22

But his answer was: My Father is still working even now, and so I am working.
John 5:17

who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father
Galatians 1:4

Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Galatians 2:20

What else needs to be said?

I'm in a mcdonalds waiting for my brother to get done with work, so i'm just blabbing.

It's about that time of the year. School will come officially to a close May 14th. It's not going to be an easy ride for these last few weeks. I've got two big papers and a mammoth project to work on. I am really looking forward to school ending. I just don't have the discipline to get my homework done so that I can enjoy school better. Even though I've put these assignments off, I am trying to be disciplined in doing them before the day they're due. But next semester I'm really going to work on it.

I've officially been a leader in the youth group at Faith. The high school group is called "TEAM" and I dont know what it stands for or what it means. The boys are divided up into jr/sr and then sophomores and then freshmen. I started out with the jr/sr. small group, which already had two leaders. The past few weeks I've been with the freshmen small group tho. I'm not sure if I'm going to stay with them (I'd like to). Some of the guys like to do parkour, and thats pretty sweet. I like to parkour with them. Soon I will learn flipping.

This semester I've gone to like 5 different churches. I've visited Redemption Bible Church, Northwestern Family Church, and Faith. I've regularly attended Baptist Tabernacle and Crossway. I really don't like going to a different church every week, so I recently decided I'm going to cut it down to two churches. One for when I'm at school and one for when I'm at home. I don't really know what it is about BT, but I'm just tired of it. So for home I chose Crossway. I still haven't decided what I'm going to do about when I'm at school. It would make sense for me to go to Faith, since I work in the youth group. I went there for their sunday morning service for the first time this past sunday. It reminds me of BT. So I'm kind of repelled from that. Didn't like Northwestern, so I'm leaning towards Redemption. Not really sure if what I'm doing is right. I should probably stay at BT because that's where my family goes. And I should probably go to Faith, because I'm already connected in there. I just want to go to a church that engages me, a church that feels alive and is growing.

I owe 4100 for this semester of school. It was due last wednesday. I dont have money for it. Anybody want to pitch in?

This summer I'm going to be working in the mail room and maintenance at Trinity. Monday, Wednesday and Friday will be mail room, and Tuesday/Thursday will be Maintenance. I'm not really sure if that's a good thing or not. I'll have to drive down there and back about every day. But I get about 24 mpg in my truck, so it's not too bad. I was thinkin about takin the train, or even riding my bike.

Oh, what to celebrate?

I wrote this on the ride home from Iowa this past Sunday

What is the purpose of holidays? A holiday is to remember an event, right? To remember and celebrate?

Well, today is Easter. The holiday to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There’s nothing better to celebrate, except for maybe the birth of Christ, which is just as important. But today, outside of church this morning, nothing was said about Jesus. At least nothing that I heard. The focus was on the Easter ham. We didn’t even pray before we ate today. We may celebrate on this day… but we certainly didn’t celebrate Easter.

Jesus simply wasn’t part of Easter this year.

Being with family during holiday’s isn’t wrong. Pigging out during holidays isn’t wrong. But when you don’t celebrate with Jesus, it’s meaningless I think.

So what did you celebrate this Easter?