So, is there a God?

This is surely a fundamental question that pretty well all humans have thought about throughout human history. The vast amount of religions are a testimony to the human tendency to grasp at the divine. This in itself is probably the strongest testimony to God'’s existence. It can be said that all humans have an innate desire; an emptiness that they feel must be filled. The human quest for power, riches, sensual pleasure, security, fame and indulgence in natural pleasures is a response to the heartfelt desire for a higher goodness. Temporal pleasures and even natural love is often short-lived and ultimately unfulfilled. As humans indulge in their passions their desires continue to go unfulfilled. Many attempt to fill the void with increasing worldly pleasures with little results.

Such powerful and elusive desires are a cry from the soul which looks for something that can't be gratified by the things of this world. Consider discontent of the heart as a mark of God calling us to embrace him.

Love and Faithfulness...

In the last little while it has been awesome to see God at work in my life and in the life of the ministry under my care; youth and young adult ministry. There came a point in my time here since January, 2006, that I realized that I just couldn't go on unless I had someone come on board and help out with these ministries. This was something that God was saying to me. "You will not make it unless someone comes along side of you and partners with you in this... SO PRAY ABOUT IT!" So I listened to God's voice which I heard through reading scripture and advice from other wise people in my life. As I prayed, I asked God to bring to my mind a person that He would see fit to partner up with me... He brought a certain person in my church to mind. Before I even had the chance to approach this guy about helping out in the youth and young adult ministries, he came to me! God had been working on his heart to come to me and offer his services in this endeavour! I was blown away by God's power in the whole thing... by His Sovereignty and His Omnipotence!

This was the first real thing that happened that kick-started my heart again. I was very down and out about the whole ministry thing and I was about ready to throw in the towel. I knew that if God didn't provide someone to partner with that I just wouldn't last in this place. But I knew that God is faithful and that He looks after us even when it seems like He doesn't. He's just waiting for us to stop leaning on our own strength and start leaning on His and trusting Him to do the things that He promised He would do!

The continuing things that God keeps blessing with is the fact that now, we are actually starting to get things done for The Kingdom. Before, everything was stagnate and now we know that God has begun to work because of our willingness to listen to Him and His guidance in everything. We are in the process of starting a Coffeehouse for University and College age students as a place for them to just come and relax with their friends. This is a HUGE endeavour and impossible to get done alone. It's hard to explain all the little things that have been falling into place for this... things that seemed impossible to achieve, yet, keep falling into place with little or no effort.

God is good! He is faithful! and nothing in this world... repeat... NOTHING in this world can ever tell me different. Doesn't mean that life isn't hard or will ever be hard again, but I do know that whatever happens, He is right there beside me and helping me through anything and everything that is happening. He promised He would... so He will... No doubts... even when it seems like He's not there... I know He is because He promised He would be.

Anyway. I'm just glad that I don't have to go through this life without knowing that God is there for me in and through everything. You may call Him a crutch, but I call Him my Lord!

Is it just a brain malfunction?

Anger... It's a pretty confusing, yet fascinating emotion. Anger wells up from annoyance which can come from a huge variety of sources. If you let your annoyance blossom and ripen, it would turn into full blown anger. In return, the people around you feel uncomfortable, and sometimes even hurt by your reaction to whatever it was that annoyed you in the first place.
Where does it all come from? What happened in the past that placed that trigger in our lives? The trigger that some might call "a hair trigger" because it is so easily pulled.
Is everyone like that? Or are their some on this Earth who actually let the things that would normally annoy me just pass them by and forget about it?

Yeah... a pretty interesting subject.

I know this guy who has a sister-in-law with a brand new boyfriend... well, relatively new I guess. I am told that this guy that I am talking about here has a child and whenever this boyfriend is around with the sister-in-law he gravitates towards this guy's child and like automatically starts to play with this child. Ok, that's not so weird I guess, but I'm told that when the boyfriend plays with this child that he always is putting his hand on the child's back and rubbing the childs back and that type of thing.
Getting to the point... I am also told that this behaviour makes this guy extremely annoyed to the point of wanting to punch this boyfriend's face off. I mean, come on. He says that everyone else thinks nothing of the behaviour so he feels that he might be being irrational.

WHAT placed this man's anger within him? Why does he get angry at such a thing? This is just one example of something that may annoy another person... it's a real life story, which makes it even better as an example.

One day anger flares up at something that the day before did nothing. Incredible.... Why though? Why is it like this with emotions... so unstable and unreliable, yet God placed them within us to use and control for His glory.

God, help us.

Is it OK?

I have a confession to make. But it may not be as big a deal as I'm making it out to be. For the sake of all things that I like, I sure hope so! (meaning, I hope it's not a big deal; I couldn't figure out whether I should use the word, "so" or "not".) Anyhow, here it is:

I like the color purple. That's right, I like purple. Is there anything wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with a guy liking purple? (aside from the obviously soceital acceptance of a gay guy liking purple - it's like society expects him to like purple.)

But more importantly to this quandry, I must say that I also like the lighter version of purple, which I prefer to refer to as 'perriwinkle.' How's that for a confession?! Pretty silly I know, but I find the deep richness of purple very inspiring and motivating, while the lighter side of perriwinkle soothes and calms. It's a perfect balance.

These aren't my favorite colors, but it's in the family of my favorite.

Happy Anniversary!

It's been one year since we started this blog. But more importantly, it's been ten years since we have known each other. And so, here, on this blog, I find it only fitting that I include a tribute to our friendship - now a decade old.

This is by no means a polished list. I just typed as I thought of things. There is very little editing I did to this list. I noticed that it started off with only college memories, so I stuck to that. Some overlap, but the distinct memories in some of the detailed events called for special recognition.

Happy Anniversary!


Memories - all of them, or at least all of those I could remember
1. richard and andrew's room, watching them play cards
2. "thank you for the peaches, Bryan"
3. a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence: me actually going to breakfast, on a saturday no less, and you showing up in a big rig with your dad
4. eating pizza in the basement of Pizza Twice in Woodstock, NB, watching a lonely stranger play the lottery machine, while ringing in the new year
5. ringing in the year 2000 with just the two of us
6. not planning on ringing in 2000 together, by ourselves, but enjoying it even moreso
7. having you scare the living begeezers out of me in the stairwell
8. stealing some of Jer's acid urinal cleaner
9. dropping acid urinal cleaner in Estey's fish bowl
10. watching Estey's fish swim backward, convulse, and turn upside down
11. you grinding snow into your gotee for me to take a picture
12. crawling around under the new dorm
13. tapping on the girls dorm floors and hearing, "Hey, did you hear that?!"
14. creating a webpage together
15. staying up late together
16. failing classes together
17. you making a funny face in your room for me to take a picture
18. scanning countless pictures on Mark's scanner
19. entering Mark's room night after night to use his scanner
20. trying to figure for hours how to get one picture scanned
21. reading through somebody's very disturbing diary
22. you sticking half your body through my basement window so I can take a picture
23. pulling our first all-nighter together, just for the fun of it
24. watching buck and jer try to stay awake during our all-nighter
25. all of us falling asleep in class the next day
26. making fun of Vic's words..."pooer" and "moore"
27. making fun of Vic's front row shower
28. making fun of ourselves and others with silly drawings
29. making silly drawings in class of us and our friends
30. never becoming roommates...figure that one out!?
31. spending countless hours poring over the female pictures in our yearbook
32. spending countless hours figuring out who we would like to date
33. spending one second to figure out we don't stand a chance
34. Jill mersereau...oh, whoops, i hope she's still not doing a search online for her name right now...she may find this, and send me another nasty email
35. Surprisingly attending a Saturday morning seminar with Jeremy Kingsley
36. Becoming convicted by Kingsley's words and lifestyle
37. Adopting his "Have At It" motto...to which this blog's title owes tribute
38. making fun of Timbit - his tummy, his cokes, his Twila Paris collection
39. rearranging Murph's ordered-by-color cd collection
40. watching Murph pop his zits in the mirror
41. Murph and I buying letter stickers that spelled your name for the back of Murph's chair, where you sat every time you came to our room...what did we ever do with those stickers? did we peel them off at the end of the school year? or have they remained to this day as a lasting memory of our presence in those halls?
42. enjoying a picture Mark made on his computer of us two "eating and sharing crackers"...what ever came of that pic? do we still have it?
43. watching you burn your olfactories, sinuses, mouth, throat, and insides as you put down more hot peppers, jalepenos, and hot sauce than one person should consume in his entire life
44. sleeping overnight in your dorm room
45. arm-wrestling
46. praying together
47. praying together in the new dorm prayer chapel
48. falling asleep in the new dorm prayer chapel while trying to pray
49. listening to Murph's cd backwards
50. even have Doc Taylor pay us a visit in the dorm
51. "girls lots of yellow"...our version of "it's fun to smoke marijuana"
52. watching old Oral Comm speech videos
53. making fun of our own and others' Oral Comm speeches
54. looking for that evasive video of Murph's "I've got a head like a ping-pong ball" speech
55. never finding it, and being much disappointed
56. having MacNeil tell us that he tapes over the old ones
57. you coming into the study room at 3am to see how I'm progressing on my paper due in a few hours that I hadn't started yet
58. you coming into the study room at 4am to see how I'm progressing on my paper, and finding me fast asleep on the desk
59. you finding me fast asleep on the stairs
60. you finding me fast asleep anywheres I put my head down
61. spending an entire night at Tim's "studying"
62. the only time all five of us were completely clean shaven for a picture together
63. watching Jer obsess over Andrea
64. breaking the door in the new dorm
65. getting hit in the mouth in the new dorm lounge
66. sleeping over in your room
67. collecting pillows from the lounge to sleep on
68. sleeping in Mitch's bed when he left
69. sleeping in your room even if you weren't there
70. wrestling with Mitch
71. making endless sound clips
71a. "chimpanzee"
71b. "haven't you dropped dead yet"
71c. "ahHahahaAh!"
71d. "hello, is anyone there?"
72. making sound clip stories...
72a. "you don't look like our son..."
72b. "cross the bridge, back through water..."
73. getting shoved in the air a few feet by Leland
74. obsessing over our girlfriends... a lot!
75. you rollerblading
76. Boots shaved head
77. crazy classmates
78. (my mind has gone numb with trying to think of all our memories, but now I want to get to 100)
79. Jer died after our first year
80. bonding in our second year
81. in fact that reminds me of something we did a lot of: James Bonding...hehe...man, that was fun
82. spending time with you while you weightlifted
83. having you teach/help me weight lift once
84. knocking on people's dorm rooms and running away
85. campfires with Buck and the gang
86. riding around in your Tercel...I liked that car...that's what got me interested in small foreign cars
87. having our "dad" Dale make pizza for all of us
88. taking "rides" on your Tercel with my bike
89. wiping out
90. procrastinating together
91. not graduating together
92. waiting in the supper line together
93. you being accused of stalking by Melissa H.
94. laughing together...all the time
95. taking pictures of you whenever you made a funny face
96. Jer's jersey...is that still hanging up? - I'm gonna e-mail and find out.
97. Mark's discipleship group in his room
98. receiving nicknames: Puss n' Boots & Spike, while playing Volleyball
99. hanging out in each other's room...all the time
100. creating stories from our dreams
101. just being together...all the time.
102. hearing the birds get up in the morning before actually going to bed.