Catch up

Sometimes the only time I have to journal is when I have nothing with me but my BlackBerry. This is the delayed accumulation of the best of the past few weeks...



Friday, July 20
In the past year and a half, the most demonstrably excited I’ve gotten was when my friend told me that Alec Baldwin had received Christ as his Savior. It seemed particularly sweet because I naturally assumed that his brother Stephen had led him to Christ. It turned out my friend had actually mistaken Alec for Stephen, but my initial reaction was nonetheless so animated that it even struck me as an unusual outburst of excitement. I’m generally not given to boisterous expression of things that excite and delight me (Grace excels at that trait). I therefore deduced from this that the ultimate passion of my heart, the cause for greatest celebration, is to see people reconciled to God.
Recently, a friend told me that three of our friends in college, solid Christians at the time, have become raging atheists. This shocked me. In fact, it’s rare that I’m this shocked. It stuck with me. I suppose it follows, then, that what would bring me the most excitement would also bring commensurate shock when the formula is reversed.




Tuesday, July 24
Spent most of the day hanging around a video shoot for Allison Transmissions, which will incorporate Bill Nye the Science Guy. I got to take lotsa pictures of buses. This will aid me when I look for material for print ads.


Monday, Aug. 6
At 4am, Pesci’s wailing woke me up, so I went out to give him some assurance. I don’t know what a cat is thinking when he yowls in the middle of the night, but meeting him seemed to turn his wailing into purring. Willie was not far behind, so I visited with my two kitties in the dark of the front hallway. I sat briefly on the floor and enjoyed the sound of dual purring and the feel of cat heads visiting my hands.

I listened to a Ravi Zacharias podcast on Jonah while on the treadmill, and Ravi made the point that when Jonah was heading away from the will of God, he was making the mistake of declaring the Ninevites immoral while forgetting that immorality is always preceded by impiety. We as a nation are wrong morally because we are irreverent in our hearts.

Jonah was asleep in the boat en route to the opposite direction of Nineveh. God said, “Arise!” In the Hebrew, this means, “Wake up!”
When we know what we are doing is wrong, we have to keep moving, lest our morality convict us. Jonah couldn’t afford to stop and give his thoughts pause. He didn’t want to hear God’s voice.
I thought of what a friend once told me about a girl who didn’t like to be alone and left to her own thoughts. We cannot flee our morality. Many of us go on flirting with danger, afraid to stop, lest the consequences, the implications, the doubts catch up to our attempts to outrun them.

My shins have begun to itch once again, and so I must apply flucinonide twice a day. I don’t mind Stockton, but I hate central valley air.