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Rev_Strack
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Name: Michael
Gender: Male
Interests: Jesus Christ, my LORD and Savior. My family, St.Louis Rams, football, playing guitar,muscle cars, and the Great Outdoors - God's Creation.
Expertise: Saving fair maidens from peril.
Occupation: Student at THE Southern Baptis
Industry: The Church
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
10/23/2005
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| After a week of Bible School and a week at home, I'm back in action and trying to make the most of the next month before I find myself back in school again. That's right it's only five weeks until the end begins and my final semester in Seminary kicks off. There are major questions and decisions about the future that are VERY open at this point. Lots to be in prayer about and moving ahead to where God is calling me.
These last two weeks, and as far as the site goes, month has been busy, but good. When I am really honest with myself, that's the way I like, no wasted time. Teaching 1st and 2nd Graders in Bible School ended up being a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be. I mean, I did it because they needed a teacher and it was able to minister to a group of children. The fact that they were well behaved and had good attitudes was really a blessing. It was still a long week, working full-time and doing Bible School all evening. But getting to go home on my birthday, made up for being tired. I got to spend a week catching up with family and sharing stories of all that has happened over the last three months. I even got a few new shirts and books for my birthday. But the highlight of the trip home, besides seeing my nephew, would be the all day trip to Six Flags. I never thought we would have that much fun! Well now for some sleep........
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| While some find the price of a gallon of gasoline to be outrageous, there are a few people who apparently feel differently. At $3.35 and up here in Kentucky, some motorists do not see a need to converse gas. While grilling pork steaks at a friends house, a neighbor sat with his '80s Buick idling on the street. After running an errant, he sat for ten minutes, parked, before shutting the engine off. Then later, while putting gas in my own car, another customer sat with his car idling in front of a pump. He wasn't pumping gas, or running his air conditioning, he was talking on his cell phone. I mean the price of gas is right in front of you, it's over $3 a gallon, why waste it when you are not even moving? I guess it doesn't cost THAT much to put gas in your car, right? Why try to save any?
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| With the semester over, it would be hard to miss the many thoughts about this summer, which is when I came across this article from the Urbana website.
"Your Summer Job: A short term missions trip
by Paul Grant
 We were stuck on the roof. The rest of the crew had gone
home for the day, leaving Steve to finish caulking the seam between the
gutter and the rubber roofing. Steve was incredibly slow and not
incredibly bright. When the rest of the crew got tired of waiting, they
took one of the two trucks back to the shop, leaving Steve behind.
And leaving
me, of course. Steve wasn’t allowed to drive company trucks, for a
variety of reasons. So I, the college boy on the roofing crew for the
summer, and the second-lowest person on the totem pole, was told to
stick around till the lowest one was finished caulking. They took off,
with the truck’s radio blasting country music, and I sat down on the
chimney. It would be a while yet.
Or even a
longer while. As he worked his way around the roof’s edge, Steve had
come upon the ladder. It was leaning in his way as he caulked the seam,
so he pushed it away. It crashed on the lawn, two stories below us. The
ladder was our only way off the roof. The homeowner was on vacation.
I couldn’t bring myself to yell at Steve, because he was already distressed. “Why
do I always make dumb mistakes?” he kept asking himself. Steve probably
had an undiagnosed learning disability. He was also, by all appearances, an
alcoholic, and was twenty-five years my senior.
Nobody on the crew liked him, because he was unreliable, made costly mistakes,
and was always looking for handouts. One time he knocked his cigarette ashes
down through a knothole into the attic below. We were spared a fire by God’s
grace alone.
The next hour, until a kind pedestrian replaced our ladder for us, gave me
an opportunity to develop a compassionate heart for Steve. He was a lost soul,
a hurting soul. He needed a drink in a bad way, and he had already smoked his
last cigarette. As he fiddled with a piece of rubber, we sat, waited, and talked.
It dawned on me that Steve was as much a part of God’s creation as any
of the rest of us. He was lonely, diseased and doomed to spend his life bringing
up the rear, but God loved him. Tragically, he didn’t know about it.
Even more tragically, he was a racist, and declined my invitation to the church
picnic because it was a majority-black congregation.
This man was as unattractive a person as one could find, but God changed my
heart that evening to compassion. It’s not that I couldn’t have
discovered compassion elsewhere, but there is so much more involved in compassionate
workplace relationships.
A summer job can be as formative as you want it to be. Of course there is
the wages. And there is that ever-elusive “relevant job experience” with
which to pad your résumé for after college. But more importantly,
if you’re intentional about it, your summer job can help you become the
person you want to be.
A summer job is far more than a pass-time. It is life. Specifically, the ways
you live your life this summer will help shape how you live life in general.
Author Annie Dillard wrote, in The Writing Life, “How we spend our days
is, of course, how we spend our lives.” In other words, how you approach
your summer job is how you live your summer, and how you live your summer is
how you live your life.
That’s not to convey a sense of urgency. Our contemporary lives are
far too important and rushed. A summer job can actually help us to break out
of those patterns, and establish a healthier pace for the rest of life.
Without planning, a precious summer will pass you by. But the most important
aspect of your summer job is not the five-year plan, not the money, not the
résumé. It’s about the moment-by-moment living.
College life can become abstract and divorced from reality. Life in the academy
is about the future. It’s about planning and preparing. The routine of
work, on the other hand, can reconnect us with the meaning of life. Humans
were made to be productive. When we work, when we contribute, serve, build
and repair, we regain a bit of the humanity college extracts from us.
That’s not the best part. Summer jobs are about relationships. They
allow us to meet entirely new kinds of people and learn brand new skills. Fifteen
weeks on a crew can make you a tight group, and can allow you to learn from
experienced folk, as well as enable you to be an agent of God’s mercy.
That day on the roof with Steve, I came to understand that God cared about
my hard heart as much as Steve’s broken body. I had the fortune of being
able to submit to God’s molding and shaping; Steve had spent his life
resisting God. God had called me to that crew, to be a taste of heaven to a
lost man.
As far as I know, Steve didn’t respond to Christ’s offer that
summer. But by God’s grace, I did. I learned about the dignity of work,
and the dignity of fellow humans. I learned to have a job, and to discharge
my duties with a whistle. Not bad for a summer hauling shingles up a ladder." Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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Football is my first love....when it comes to sports. Otherwise the answer is Alana, if you count girls you like in kindergarten as a 'first love.' Sadly, my family moved across town after kindergarten and she moved the next year too. So holding hands in kindergarten didn't get me anywhere...good or bad. But that is not what this is about.
I really like football, maybe too much, but that's not the point of this post. Besides football, or rather, behind football, ice hockey is my second favorite sport. Growing up in the St.Louis area, it is learned that the city and everyone with in 100 miles follows one thing. Not the weather, The St.Louis Cardinals. Some how, while living inside that radius, I grew to follow a different team - The St.Louis Blues. Watching games on TV and then getting to go to my first game - I was hooked. But it should be no surprise. My dad liked hockey. In the early 90's, St.Louis was without football, and I didn't really know how to play anyway and while baseball was on break for the winter, Hockey was king. Of course it helped that Bernie Federko and Brett Hull was lighting up the goals, and the horn sounded often in "The Old Barn.*" Little did I know at the time, that my maternal grandfather was a Blues fan from the beginning of the franchise in 1967! On Friday nights in the sixties, he was strapping on his own skates and playing in YCMA-type leagues in the Metro area. I don't know how long he played, but when my brother and I became interested in hockey almost 30 years later, he brought over some old sticks. We emptied out the driveway and dropped the puck. With goals made of sheets tucked under empty garbage cans, we were "banging 'em in off the post" thinking of Curtis Joseph, Adam Oates, and the Cavallini
brothers. Unfortunately, it was only floor hockey and I never went skating enough to really play ice hockey. All this was not lost on playing floor hockey in PE class throughout school.
I liked playing goalie. Maybe it was because no one else wanted to, and I like being different. Since I only knew floor hockey, the lack of speed away from the ice meant nothing to me. I was a bigger kid, but I was used to holding onto a stick and controlling the puck. As kid I was good at math and understood angles need to take out shots. I was stopping my Dad's in the driveway. There is something about excelling in some area of life that brings confidence to the rest of it. I was not the fastest kid, and we're not even going to talk about doing pull ups, but hockey was one the things I was good at. In grade school and jr. high, I would play goal until we got a lead and then convince someone else to take goal, while I can out and played defense, closing out the game from the blueline. In high school, I would take my spot between the pipes, only it was just a box taped on the wall. Here I would shutout the scorers from the amateur high school team. They were used to the ice and speed of skating past defenders to fake out goalies. I wasn't afraid of them, or the puck and used every bit of my body to keep everything from touching that box on the wall. It wasn't real hockey, it was a lot of fun.
In the spring of 2002, the Blues where continuing there 25 year run of being in the playoffs and they landed a first round series against the hated Chicago Blackhawks. At Moody in downtown Chicago, I got excited and decided to rounded up people to go. It was playoff hockey and I wasn't missing it! I had never been to a playoff game of any kind and this would be great! I ended up going to both games playoff games in Chicago that were shutouts by St.Louis Blues goalie, Brent Johnson. The Blackhawk fans were not happy, but I was loving it! The Blues would loose in the next round, but hockey was in my blood and I had ceased a great opportunity. So now you know what the colors of my blog are blue and yellow - RAMS and BLUES!!!
The last two years, the Blues have not made the playoffs, and I've had to find other teams to root for on the Quest for the Cup. There are two identical twins that play on the Vancouver Canucks and on the same line. I was rooting for them, but they lost in the second round to the Ducks. So now it's down to my other team in the playoffs, the Buffalo Sabres. I almost lost all interest in the rest of the playoffs, and it's only halfway. So here's to the Sabres, keep it interesting and make sure the RedWings don't win another Cup! And just to be sure I'm from St.Louis, here is a list of all the years the Cardinals won the World Series: 1926, 1931, 1934, 1942, 1944, 1946, 1964, 1967, 1982, and 2006. Red Schoendienst was a player or coach for five of those championships. I love his last name! A fellow German with 12 letters!
* The St.Louis Arena was where the Blues used to play from 1967 to 1994. It was built in 1929 and its nickname was "the old barn."
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I had to reading the book of Malachi for Old Testament with Dr. Betts and there were
several things that I walked away with, but I'll just share two with you for the sake of time.
At the end of chapter two,
divorce is addressed. The famous quote of “'I hate divorce,' says
the Lord, The God of Israel” is hard to miss in verse 16, but
that's really just the measurable part of the problem. Malachi
clearly states that it is about the attitudes and actions of how one
deals with their covenant companion. The attitude of the people
clearly shows disregard for God's desire and design for their lives,
yet they weep and groan that they do not find favor in the Lord. I
wonder true that comment is of our churches – married, divorced, or
never been married. Do we wonder what God does is trying to teach us
in hard times, and yet are we really obeying His commandments? Even
honoring the wife of my youth I don't even "know" yet? It's a
question that felt me thinking, because I just wanted to say, “I'm
single” and write it off as, not my problem. I don't know what that really even means.
The other
thing that really stuck with me was the connection between robbery and
tithes. Reading chapter 3:7-12, I couldn't help but think about the
American church and how relevant this message is for us. Malachi
says, you say you want to return to God, until it gets practical and
it means you have to change everything, including what you do with
your money. We are robbers because we hold back what is God's. We are
taking what is God's for ourselves. And as we hold back our money and
spend it on ourselves, we misplace our faith and trust in something
other than God as our provider. It is NOT that there is to be NO
storehouse or savings, rather that savings is totally given to God.
It is not our savings for us. It is not about how much we have. It is
all about God. The encouragement is for us to be faithful to God in
everything, including our money, and He will provide. I believe we
are even called to test this principle of faithfulness even today and
“and see if I [God] will not throw open the floodgates of heaven
and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for
it.”
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