No promises...

I had something that I wanted to write about, but as I logged on to do it, I totally forgot about what that was. So, in attempt to jump-start my thinking, I'm just going to write. If this goes into nowhere, I'm sorry. But, since no one reads this anyways, I'm only wasting my own time.

A great opportunity has come my way in the past week. Last Tuesday, I found out that two out of my three internship possibilities that I considered as a "good" chance at getting officially fell through. The last one might as well be over as well. The youth pastor doesn't seem to be a very personable guy (or maybe he just doesn't return phone calls or emails). Then the next day, I got an email saying that there is a church about 30 minutes from here that needs a youth pastor. I went and visited with the pastor and am going back in a little over a week to teach wednesday night as a sort of "trial" run. If all goes well, I should have a part-time job until the semester is over and then a full-time job for my internship. God is good.

Referreeing is going well. I am starting to feel really comfortable on the court and confident in my ability. It's really fun and I make some decent money doing it. I can't complain.

Noah preached a good sermon on pride the other night. Which got me thinking... pride is not saying "I'm good at X" but instead saying "Because I am good at X, I am better than person Y" or something to that effect. At least, that's what popped into my head. I need to look at it some more, but it's interesting. Pride is either a result or a cause of one demeaning the value of the grace of God, I can't decide. But someone who realizes the utter infinitude of the grace of God must understand their total human depravity and therefore cannot have pride within them. Given that we are all prideful, it just goes to show that none of us can even come close to fathoming the grace of God. Which makes it even all the more amazing.

We need to sing more hymns in church. Some hymns are terrible, just like a lot of our contemporary songs, but lots of hymns are really good. And I mean really good. The words are usually just so powerful. We sang a few in chapel Sunday, but the third verse of "It is Well with My Soul" God to me, I teared up a little bit. Here's the words:

My sin... O, the bliss of this glorious thought,
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
It is well with my soul
It is well, it is well with my soul.

If more of us would keep those words in the forefront of our minds, then we'd be living a lot less pridefully and conforming a lot more to the image of Christ. Simply amazing. It doesn't get any better than that. It's amazing how much of Christian life, Christian theology, Christian thought, Christian practice, Christian anything can be traced back to the Cross. We should find ourselves there more often.