Of Disappointment And Daisy’s

Life is strange. There rarely seems to be pure moments. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It seems as if even when everything is great there is always something that could be better. Even on vacation, why do I fight with my wife? Or doing something that I love, thoughts about past failures enter in and seemingly ruin the purity of it all. On top of that, put in the mix humans and things really get messy. We disappoint each other often. We can so easily go into “protect mode” when around people with whom we are having disagreements. It seems like the longer that we are in a friendship, the greater the potential for conflict. Because of that we intentionally remain superficial, at arms length with many people. The attitude is that the further away I keep you the safer I am. While on the surface that seems logical, it could only be beneficial if the purpose of your life was to be shielded from all conflict and trials. However, as a Christ follower, my calling is to love God and the most practical way that happens is when I love people. I “prove” my God directed love is genuine and not merely theoretical when I love people. Most of the Ten Commandments and half of the new covenant says that I love and follow Jesus by loving people.
My problem is that I want to love people that are the most like me. Not the idiot who cut in front of me, stole my wallet or was mean to my kids. Surely Jesus wasn’t talking about those type of lost souls, was he?
So when people disappoint us we have a dilemma: scream out for our rights, our view point to be heard, our protection, stomping our feet, or we could chose to wave our rights by seeking the best for the one that I am in conflict with. It seems to me that makes sacrifice real and living the gospel - genuine.

Sunset

I love sunsets and sunrises. (Actually sunsets are better because I am a night person) I figure that you only get so many in your life and then: poof it's gone. This one was taken in Anapra, Mexico about four weeks ago. Today is day number 15,588, for me, and how many of these magical moments have I experienced? Maybe I have witnessed almost one thousand of them, that's not very many considering that 15,588 days is 42 years eight months and 4 days!

So maby you should enjoy a few real soon, before the poof!

Uncle Jake

I was very young when I first remember Julius. I couldn’t have been even five or six when he was working in the basement of our house on Greenfield road in Berkley, Michigan. Julius was a friend of the family and man, could he put in drop ceilings. My mom and dad had decided to finish the basement of our small three bedroom home so we could host the annual Jacobucci-Coon Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Birthday parties and, I suppose, so we could have a place for our toys. They had built a small bathroom and a closest on the west wall, a large laundry room in the southeast corner where the stairs emptied into the basement and two open areas for entertaining the guests. On this day Julius was working on the drop ceiling with the young version of me watching every move he made and asking all of the standard boy type questions. As I watched him on the ladder, hanging the metal rails that would hold the white panels, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how he was going to get one of those panels around one of the always cold metal stanchion poles that ran across our basement. Julius, always the joker and cigar smoker loved to tease with us kids. He and his wife Helen were a little older than my parents. They had met just after my parents tied the knot in August of 1952 when they rented an upstairs apartment from Julius and Helen in a tree lined suburb of Detroit, aptly named Ferndale. They were instant friends. Julius and Helen had no children and at that early point in my parents married life they were child free too. They quickly became close, often enjoying each other’s company. Even after moving out of that Ferndale apartment on their own, my parents had maintained their relationship with the Sebastians and still do to this day, although Helen passed away a few years back. Sometime in the eighties Julius and Helen moved to the clean, dry air of Sante Fe, New Mexico and my parents have driven out many times just to visit.

I remember some of the parties that they would have together, especially around New Years Eve. New Years Day was special because that was Helen’s birthday, January 1st. They would all laugh and laugh among Julius' cigar and Helen's cigarette smoke all night. Uncle Jake, as we all called him, would often tease me about wanting to take me to Vietnam for a vacation (the Vietnam War was being fought at this point) and I would always say no take me to Australia! He would come back with the idea that his friends, the Viet Cong, wanted me to come over there and meet a man named Charlie. I laughed until my side hurt.

I think that I may have learned to laugh and tease from Uncle Jake. He always was laughing, smiling and encouraging to me.

That day, in the basement with Uncle Jake looking down on me from that ladder, he went into a long story about how he was going to get a ceiling tile around that pole in my basement. He had arranged with the Coast Guard to come with one of there huge helicopters and lift the house up with a chain so he could put that tile in. He wanted me to go outside and look for the chopper.

Thanks for the laughs Uncle Jake.

Pray For Kelly

Please Pray For Kelly (on the right), she is a young woman in my youth Ministry that fell 15 feet from a tree about ten days after returning from our Mexico trip. She broke a vertibrae and had to have emergency surgery. She is in good spirits and is desperately struggling to regain her ability to walk.
Please pray for complete healing.

Blogging For Cheese

If I were a mouse, I would blog for cheese.
If I blogged for my cheese lately, I would be dead.

The last six/seven weeks of my life have been somewhat busy.
I took a little tripperoo to Anapra, Mexico with 35 friends and worked our butts off.
We built two complete homes for two different families, (House number one is in the pic)
We built a 75 foot long by six foot high, cement block retaining wall to hold back a hill next to a church
And for good measure we put a second story (floor, walls and roof) on the bunkhouse that we began in February. (4,200 miles ~ 19 days.)

Then for kicks Connie and I went on vacation back east: Lake Placid, New York, Bar Harbor, Maine, Boston, Massachusetts and Washington D.C. (3,300 miles ~ 14 days)

I don’t really want to drive anymore.
I don’t remember what my routine used to be.
I do remember now that I like my own toilet because I don’t have to wipe it off and put all the paper protection on it before use. The nastiest one was in a Kmart in Maryland, gag me.
I like, no love, my own bed, it’s just right!

Random Question:
How do you know that you have had a spiritual experience???
Please Answer.