Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Chapter One

That's the name of one of Shane & Shane's songs. It's based on John 1:18 "No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." I was listening to my ipod at work today on shuffle and this song happened to come on. As I listened to the lyrics and thought about what that verse was talking about I just started crying. I realized that lately I've had somewhat of a hard heart toward God and haven't seen Christ as who he truly is and considered him my only source of joy. He is the image of the invisible God and because of him we get the awesome pleasure of seeing God displayed in Christ's face. This is the joy of the world. We see God through Christ, and it is everything to us. Psalm 16:2 "I say to the Lord, 'You are my Lord;I have no good apart from you.'" God has shone into our hearts and has allowed us to not only know him, but delight in him. Praise God that he caused this song to come on and allowed me to truly hear it. I'll leave you with the lyrics. They make an awesome and humble prayer.

Chapter 1
Stir my affections
Stir my affections
Stir my affection for You
for You're my only hope

You Yeshua
explained the way He moves
as just an ordinary man
then again, You're the first, Jesus
and by Your hand we move
You're the image of the invisible God
You are God, You are God

Bring fascination
Bring fascination
Bring fascination of You
for You're my only hope

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Crash and Burn

Can you crash and burn at a job fair without even an interview? I think that's what just happened. Some background: I am trying to find a better job right now. Preferably one that requires some thought. I would like to try and use my degree somewhere. I heard that a local company was having a job fair. The company is ATK Thiokol. You might have heard of them, they do a lot with NASA and the space program. They were looking to fill about 300 engineering jobs. I'm a communication major with a bunch of clerical jobs under my belt. You can probably already imagine how this turned out. I knew I was a long shot, but they were hiring for some non-specialized engineering jobs like quality, so I thought what the heck, I'll give it a try. I got there at around 9 a.m. this morning and went to the front desk to sign in. I greeted the woman behind the desk, handed her my resume and proceeded to sign in. When I finished I looked back up at her and could tell she was wondering what on earth I was doing there. She asked what I was looking into and I told her quality or logistics because with my skill set I thought I would be good at them. She told me that they didn't have any of those hiring managers at the job fair and the best way to get my resume into their hands would be to go on their website and apply that way. I'm pretty sure I just got the boot. She told me I could go in and look at their materials and help myself to some refreshments if I wanted to. So I decided to not make the morning a total waste and took some information and a free pen. The pen looks like it might be a decent one, too. Anyway, that's how you can crash and burn without even an interview.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Clothing

I've been listening to Piper's current series on marriage lately. Ipods and podcasts are really cool, by the way. A week or two ago, he talked about being naked and not ashamed. He was referring back to Genesis 2:25 and the end of God's definition of marriage. As he was talking about the clothing Adam and Eve used to cover themselves after the fall I was really struck with the gospel in this passage. Adam and Eve started out as perfect and therefore there was no need to cover themselves. There was no sin. But as soon as they sinned, they knew they needed to cover themselves. And I was struck with the truth that as fallen human beings, we recognize our sinfulness and attempt to cover ourselves with our own handmade clothing. We do good deeds, give money to the poor, try to live a good life, attend some church, etc. We even recognize those individuals who don't attempt to cover their sins as evil (e.g. serial killers). But this doesn't even come close to acheiving God's standard. We are standing before God with garments of fig leaves saying "See God, I clothed myself, aren't you happy?" When what we need to do is fall before Him, and acknowledge our sinfulness and need to be clothed by Him. When we do that, God shows mercy on us and clothes us with new clothes - the blood of Christ, our righteousness. In the Garden of Eden, God removed the man-made clothes of Adam and Eve and killed an animal to give them clothes of skin. Blood was required to cover up their sin. God demanded a greater blood sacrifice to not just cover sin, but eradicate it. As Christians, we no longer walk around in our man-made fig leaf abominations. Rather we walk around in clothes wrought with blood. Praise God for that! Praise God that we can't earn it! Praise God that we don't have to try and make adequate clothing for ourselves, but that He has graciously provided all we will ever need to be holy before Him!

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

This week in work

My first post in February of '07. Work has been kicking my butt this past week. As you may remember (I think I've mentioned it here, anyway) I work for IAP in the IRS files division (the IRS contracted it out in December). This means that we have long rows of files on shelves in our buildings so we can reference certain tax returns from within the last year or two. We just got finished shipping a bunch of these out, so we now have to move everything around to make room for the new stuff. You might be able to guess where this is going. Because I'm one of the only guys in the building (the ratio is something like 2 guys to 15 girls) and the biggest at that, I got picked to do the biggest job. We have these boxes that we call shoe boxes because they're about that size (unless their my shoe boxes, in which case they are about half the size). They weigh around ten pounds each and forty of them fit in one column. As of today, I have probably moved around 45-55 columns. This means I take them off the shelving, put them on a cart, attempt to roll the cart on the catwalk grating without tipping it over, and then unload them back onto some other shelves. I counted and I have at least 39 more columns to move. That's right, that equals approx. 1,160 boxes, weighing approx. 11,600 lbs. cumulatively, lifted twice for a grand total of approx. 23,200 total pounds of lifting that I will have to do in the next two days. Wow, I just realized that's over 11 tons. You may think I'm complaining, but I'm not. It's actually nice to do work that requires physical effort. I feel like I've accomplished something at the end of the day (I ususally work the mail desk). Plus, I haven't needed to go to the gym this whole week. All-in-all, it's been pretty good.