cool story

I've been reading through the bible again, its going slower then I would like. Between Monday and today I've read and reread the book of Numbers. I think my favorite story is that of Phinehas the son of Eleazar the son of Arron the high priest.

It comes in the twenty-fifth chapter of Numbers. In the previous chapter Ballam son of Beor had not of his own volition blessed the children of Israel then in an attempt to appease the wrath of Balak the king of Moab he told them that despite the fact that he cant curse the children of Israel he does know that if Moab can get Israel to sin then God will turn away from them. So he counsels the Moabites to have their beautiful women go and seduce the men of Israel and get them to worship Baal. This plan proved so drasticly succesful that God sent a plague among the Israelites and told Moses in verse four". ⁴And the LORD said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the LORD against the sun, that the fierce anger of the LORD may be turned away from Israel."

This blatant disregard for God's holy law was so outrageous to God that he commanded this, what we would consider harsh punishment. As the lawlessness increased so did the plague untill one day one of the Israelites, Zimri took a Moabitess Cozbi into the camp of Israel before Moses and the tent of meeting. Now Phinehas seeing this blatant disrespect for the Lord and Savuior of Israel took it upon himself to personally follow the two into their tent and spit them both through the belly upon a spear. Its important to understand that Phinehas was a young man and one who had no official position and was not one of the seventy elders that Moses had in verse five given permission to kill law offenders. The scriptures don't say how old Phinehas was but he couldn't have been much older then twenty at the oldest. He was probably seventeen or eighteen right around the age where kids like us are trying to figure out whether you turn the key to the left or right to start the car.

Think what you all want, but in my opinion not only is this story a reflection of what a godly upbringing but its also a challenge to me and to you that says "how much can God ask of us before we quit on Him"

I apologize for all the mispellings and grammatical errors in this post. just deal with it

Friendship

Overall I'm finding relationships to be far more complicated and
difficult than they should be. This is going to sound really morbid and
controversial but I think you all can deal with it. My opinion right now is that people
have their uses but overall people are overrated and put into
positions that God was meant to fill
.
*waits for the gasps to quit down* yes, yes, I know, but the
question that brought me to that conclusion is "what can we get from
people that we are supposed to get from God?" Virtually everything
that people look for in a friend is something God already wants to
give them, just people are easier to get what we want out of so we
naturally turn to people rather than God.
Example's being comradeship, comfort, joy, peace, identity ect. All
these things God is waiting to give us and I dont see why I would want
to get those out of some friend, opposed to getting it out of the
creator of the universe.

I'm not saying we should all go be hermits somewhere and live to
understand God. People have their purpose. We are, because of our love
for God, want to help other people. That I think is the ultimate
purpose of friendship, to help other people. So when I have a problem
I should be able to come to one of you and tell you and I should find
a person who is willing to help me. That in my opinion is what
friendship is all about. Not about getting comfort or someone to have
fun with but to have someone who can get me back on track with God so I
can get comfort from Him, the source of it.

Hope that made sense it was written in a hurry

For lack of something better

Here are some cool pictures I took from our yard on a evening walk. Who needs the northern lights?

What shall I do?

You all can help me if you wish, I finished reading Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion and wrote all the papers and stuff that I needed to about them. I need some new book to start on that has some relationship to Church History, I'm thinking either City of God or Confessions by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, or John Bunyan's, Holy War
any help with would be most appreciated

Halloween

I think its horrible that you could ask nearly every person in america from the age of five to twenty-five and they would know automatically what Halloween is but you could ask them about St Patricks or some other less well known holiday and all they could tell is that "umm I think we get off of school that day".

That being said I'll tell you all about my Halloween and how I spent the "spookiest night of the year" Me and Jordan (13) Joshua (17) and Daniel (21) had been invited to go to my eldest brothers (25) house in New Jersey. Our second eldest brother, Joel (23) came along with his wife and we planned on spending the weekend. We left Friday night well equipped with three travel mugs of coffee, Josh's ipod hooked up to the radio and Jordan's black market supply of prehalloween candy. The three and a half hour ride went very quickly. You know your tired when you can fall asleep sitting upright, drinking a cup of coffee with Breaking Benjamin playing in the background. We all woke up when we were about ten minutes and arrived around ten oclock I think. David and his wife set us up in one of the rooms in their five room apartmeant. Not being able to resist, we played Call of Duty 4 and Halo 2 till about one oclock and then the weaker ones slowly dropped off to sleep.

The next day we got up late, (about 8:00) walked down the street to get bagels and coffee. After a leisurely breakfast we went to the park and passed the frisbee and football for a few hours. That night (halloween night) we played cards and watched Monsters vs Aliens continually being interuupted by the blasted tricker treaters.

Me at the park making an incredible catch