Happy 010

So I haven’t written in a while, in about a month I believe. I’ve been busy I guess with life, work, holidays, and friends new and old. Now that it’s 2010, I guess I should get the ball rolling and get back to writing more often. But before I start, maybe someone can help me with this problem I’m having with 2010.. What are we supposed to call this year? For the past 9 years we were able to get away with saying 0 (oh) and then whatever the year was. ‘Oh nine’ just seemed to roll of the tongue (even though of course it’s technically ‘zero nine’ instead of ‘oh nine’). Now there seems to be some dilemma though about what the abbreviation for 2010 is. I’ve already heard numerous people say 010 (oh ten) which kind of annoys me. It doesn’t sound terrible, but it just doesn’t seem right. How many times in this past week have I heard radio stations, tv stations, newspapers, and other nostalgic media sources talking about the best of ‘oh nine’? It sounds good, it sounds comfortable. I just can’t picture VH1 having a show next December about the top 20 celebrity infidelities of ‘oh ten’. That just sounds weird. And of course it goes without saying that just calling it ‘ten’ is unacceptable. Year ten sounds more like a sequel to a really bad Jack Black and Michael Cera movie than it does a year where Tiger Woods is bound to hook up with more women than Wilt Chamberlain and Gene Simmons put together. So as you can see, I’m in need of some help with a good name for 2010 (as you can also see I’m in need of help for much more than that, but we’ll deal with that at a future date, maybe sometime in oh eleven). I really don’t want to say ‘two thousand ten’ for the next 362 days so the sooner we can resolve this issue, the better.
Another issue I’m dealing with for 2010 is the issue of being friendly to strangers. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that living in Summit County tends to make me a little hostile towards strangers. Let me be clear when I say strangers I’m not talking about locals I don’t know, but tourists or front rangers who come up for vacation and act like they own the place. To be fair, most tourists are actually friendly and responsible, but the ones who are so obnoxious and irresponsible and terrible tippers and horrible drivers just seem to ruin it for the rest of them. It’s not that I’m rude to these strangers, it’s just that I tend to judge them as guilty until proven innocent. Which brings me to an interesting incident that happened to me a couple weeks ago. I was at Mackers getting my daily sweet tea (if you don’t know me well, let me explain that I have a huge sweet tea addiction) and I decided to go inside instead of the drive-thru because I had to return ‘I Love You Man’ (which was still just as funny the 3rd time around) to the Red Box. I know what you are thinking – Dollar Sweet Teas and Dollar Movie Rentals all in one place? Yes, it’s true. It’s like a little piece of heaven just one short mile from my house. So anyway, I’m inside getting my sweet tea, which is usually the best way to get it anyway because you can control exactly how much ice you want instead of hoping the drive thru worker doesn’t give you a cup full of 75% ice even though the average temperature is 25 degrees outside. Why anyone needs that much ice in a drink in the middle of winter is beyond me. Back to the story, I’m inside filling my cup with the perfect ice to liquid ratio and out of nowhere comes this little boy (maybe 5 years old) who is rapidly pirouetting all around the drink station/area or whatever its called. Needless to say, he smacks right into my leg, which causes him to stop twirling and stare directly at me. His dad is over at the soda fountain getting a coke or something (why would you get a soda when they have sweet tea right there for half the price!). He notices the whole ordeal and he apologizes and tells his son to say sorry. The boy doesn’t take his eyes of me, but on cue he blurts out “Sorry!”, to which I casually reply “It’s ok, Buddy”. I don’t know if he expected me to talk or what, but he runs back to dad and starts to tug his pants to get his attention. At this point I’m not really sure what to think, but I figure that maybe the kid just wanted his soda so he could get an energy boost before heading back into his pirouette routine. The dad looks down at the boy, and to both my and the dad’s surprise, the kid looks right back at me and says “Dad, that guy is my buddy!” At this point I’m wondering what to say since that was pretty unexpected, but I guess I did call him buddy so of course I should have known that immediately bonds us as friends. Before I can say anything else the kid, still staring at me, says “You want to sit with us for lunch?”. That one definitely took me off guard. I was actually on my way to work, so I couldn’t seriously consider his offer, but just the fact that he threw it out there was so crazy to me. I got back to my car and thought about how funny it was that a perfect stranger, albeit a 5 year old, had literally bumped into me and that turned into an invitation to have lunch with him simply because I said the word buddy. I thought about how the incident would have been different if it had been an older guy in a ten gallon hat who bumped into me. He might have said sorry, and I probably would’ve said “it’s all good” or “no worries” (because those are a lot cooler to say than “I forgive you” when someone casually says they are sorry). Then we would’ve gone our separate ways with me thinking something like ‘stupid tourists always getting in the way’ and him thinking something like ‘why don’t these crazy locals bend the bills on their hats’. If you think about it, it’s sad that we are conditioned to think that way. When a kid bumps into you, it’s no big deal, just kids being kids. My question is, at what age to we stop treating people as innocent children and a pleasant distraction and start treating them as other adults that are in our way? So here’s my thing – I don’t make new year’s resolutions, but it just so happens that here we are at 2010 and so this will sound an awful lot like one. I’m going to try to treat everyone as I would as if they were innocent until proven guilty, instead of the other way around. I’m sure I won’t always be good at it, but what would happen if the next time someone bumped into me at an eating establishment instead of being annoyed, it turned into an invitation for lunch with them? That would be pretty interesting and I might even get a new friend out of it. So it’s not a resolution, but I want to look back in 12 months and say “Man, I made a lot of new buddies in ‘one oh’.” Or ‘two ten’. Or whatever else we can come up to call this year, as long as it’s not ‘oh ten’.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place

I’ve always wondered what that other hard place is. Is it another rock? I have to believe it’s not, otherwise the saying would be ‘stuck between a rock and another rock’. Is it a brick wall? Probably not though. In fact I think it can be whatever hard place you want it to be. That’s what is great about the saying – you get the option to choose what your hard place is. Mine is the grille of a Ford Excursion. I’m positive that no one wants to be stuck in between a rock and the grille of a Ford Excursion. I mean, how do you even get into that position? It could only be the result of a terrible accident, and the only positive coming out of that situation is that if you lived to tell about it then you could truly be one of the few that could use this saying with literal meaning. “Hey, you remember that time when I was hiking and I got lost for days, but then I finally found the road and ran out in front of that SUV to ask for help, and he stopped just before hitting me, but just my luck a rock slide was happening at exactly the same time on the hill up above and that giant boulder pinned me to the front of that truck like a hood ornament? Man, I was really stuck between a rock and a hard place huh?”

Ok, this post stems from a serious problem though (nevermind that the first paragraph is probably one of the most inane ideations you will read this month). I figuratively am stuck between a rock and a hard place. I don’t know what to do, and I kind of have that “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thing going on here. How is one to way the damning of option A, to the damning of option B?! I want to do what is right, not just act on a whim and hope I made the right decision. I don’t want to give up too much info about the situation because I don’t know the person that well, but part of me does feel like I need to step up and say something, while the other part of me says to say nothing at all and just stay out of it. What do I do?

To Err is Human…

…and to forgive is divine. Thank you Alexander Pope for reminding us that we all mess up at times, and that forgiveness comes from something outside of ourselves. Also Mr. Pope, I’d like to thank you for being one of the first to lay down rhymes about everyday life in the form of heroic couplets, which incidentally is the form used today by practically every hip-hop artist and lyricist. Before Kanye proclaims himself the Michael Jordan of rap, he should take a look back at Pope’s Essay on Man which is pages upon pages of rhymes laid down over a period of many years. Seems like Pope may have put in just a little more effort than even you can claim, Kanye. But this blog is not about an 18th century poet, or a superstar who apparently lives on a different planet the the rest of us. In fact it’s about screwing up, which is something I seem to do a lot of.

Speaking of Kanye, I can sympathize with him a little I suppose. I too constantly see myself as better than I am, or deserving of more than I get. Unlike Mr. West, I wouldn’t say that I am conceited or cocky. A cocky person thinks they are better than someone else, whereas I see myself as better than my real self. Make sense? More of a distorted reality. Some examples. I would like to think of myself as an optimistic person, but in reality my tendency is to be more skeptical than hopeful. I would like to think of myself as someone who is inclined to constantly help others and build others up, but again my natural tendency is to point out the differences in people instead of lifting up our similarities. I want to be a certain way, and I am working hard to get there, but I am admittedly not there yet. Which brings me to this blog. I made a few mistakes this past week, mistakes that I thought I was past. I was untrusting and unloving, two things that I’ve been working hard to change. The problem with failing is that it tends to get us down and tell us that we are no good. It tells us that we can’t do that thing we want to do. Failure screams at us “You tried it and you couldn’t do it, give up now because you will never be able to make it where you want to!” It’s easy to give in to that voice and just go back to the way things were. Many good people have given in to failures, and even worse, some have never tried to accomplish things simply for fear of failure. This week I have been reminded of one thing though, and that is that the greatest people aren’t afraid to fail. They fail at times, just like the rest of us, but they learn from it, and push forward towards their goals instead of sinking back into the comfort of mediocrity.

Most of you reading this are probably at least casual sports fans, so I’ll use an example that happened just 2 nights ago. One of the greatest coaches in NFL history made a decision to go for a 4th down deep in his own territory and it eventually led to his team losing in a huge game. I couldn’t believe it, and it seems neither could most NFL fans or analysts. However, this turned out to be a great example of sports being able to teach us a greater lesson about life. Belichick is considered a genious, yet most agree he made a bad decision. See, even a Hall of Fame coach who has built a dynasty and won multiple Super Bowl rings makes mistakes at the job he is so great at. His bad decision could have actually turned out alright had the play worked, but it didn’t, so he failed his team at the most important time of their season so far. A bad decision and a big failure, but you and I both know that Belichick is going to come out of this even more fired up than before. He’s not going to throw in the towel and say “I can’t do this, I’m a failure!” If you know anything about that guy, that’s comical to even think about. Belichick is a great coach, and great people learn from their mistakes and become even better because of them. There are other examples. Derek Jeter, on of the most clutch hitters of all time, failed to get a bunt down with 2 strikes, costing his team an out and stopping a possible rally. Instead of dwelling on that, he went on to help lead his team to winning the World Series. Of course you know the story of Michael Jordan. He got cut from his high school basketball team. Most of us would have quit then – be serious with yourself, have you ever been cut from a team? Chances are you just gave up on the sport or the activity. But not MJ, he worked hard and went on to become the Kanye of the NBA. And don’t forget about this girl. Ok, maybe she’s not the greatest example, but have you ever seen someone make so many bad decisions and mistakes in such a short period of time? Ok, if you said Lindsey Lohan I’ll give you partial credit, but atleast Britney has made some sort of comeback. You may not be into her style (not even sure what you would classify her style as…) but she was at the bottom of the pit and at least now she’s climbed back up to only be halfway down said pit. I could list numerous examples of philosophers and business men who failed before they became great, but that’s been done many times before and you could find them with a quick google search if you are so inclined. The point is that when I mess up, I think back to things I don’t like about myself and consider going back there because it’s easier to be that way than to try to better myself but fail. I don’t want to do that. I want to be a better friend to all of you reading this, and I want to be a better helper to all people in general. I want to love people like Christ loved us, and if I give up when I fail at that, then I am giving up on what we were really put here on earth to do, and that’s to love others as ourself. I’m trying to get better, so if I mess up, I’d appreciate it if you kindly remind that if Britney could make a comeback, then so can I.

Diesel hates Snuggies

So Diesel got a ‘Snuggie for Dogs’ for a gift. Turns out that a size small is supposed to fit dogs ranging from 8 to 11 pounds. Diesel weighs 70 pounds. Needless to say, he hated every second that I made him wear it. He actually just kept walking slowly around until he eventually hid behind the recliner. Poor guy!

Boredom is interesting

Here’s what I know, I am in no way qualified to discuss at length the perils of being tired with the world. Here’s another thing I know, I hate being bored. Boredom is defined as the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest. When I am bored, I wouldn’t say that I am weary, but I am definitely restless. During most times in life, I have things to keep me occupied. I have work, usually two jobs, I have snowboarding, skating, the beach if I’m in FL, volunteering, sometimes reading or writing. I used to watch tv when I was bored, but I now tend to find that pretty boring as well, unless some sport’s playoffs are on, or the Broncos are 6-0 (holler!). The problem is that right now I am between jobs so I routinely have nothing I HAVE to do with my days. I usually go snowboarding for a couple hours, but when there is one run open, snowboarding sort of feels like that old penguin game where you just go up the lift and down the same track over and over, and over… So the problem now is that I continuously have to find things to do to keep myself occupied or I quickly become bored.

Being bored wouldn’t be so bad if I had any self-discipline. I would like to think that I could use these times to read more, write more, pray more, even meditate and memorize scripture. Maybe I could use these times to call my family and tell them I love them, or I could clean the house. Maybe I could learn how to cook. These all sound like things I want to do. The problem is that I don’t do them. I sit around and think of what fun things I could be doing, and then I talk myself out of doing them because I have little self-motivation and have no one to help motivate me. We’ve all heard it said that idle hands are the devil’s playground. There was even a really crappy movie about this, but I didn’t really care how bad the movie was because back then I was too busy looking at Jessica Alba to notice the silliness of the screenplay. However, now I am realizing that this saying is definitely true. I find that the times I am the most bored are the times I find my mind wandering in places that it has no business being. In turn, this usually leads to me putting my physical self in places that they shouldn’t be as well. It’s like Paul said in Romans 7:14-25, I know what I want to do and I want to do good, but I keep on doing things I shouldn’t simply because I lack self-discipline and control when I am idle or bored.

When I am keeping busy, I usually find that I can keep my actions and my mind in check, because I am constantly preoccupied with other things. However, does this mean that I am a better person when I am busy? Of course not! It simply means that I am covering up what is bad about me by keeping myself occupied so that I do not have time to give in to temptation. This is a good thing for sure, I believe staying away from temptation in any ethical way is a positive thing, yet it doesn’t mean that I have become a better person just because I am busy. I’m still dealing with the same issues, it just appears that everything is fine because I don’t have idle time to sit and get myself into a lot of trouble. The busy part of my life is like a fresh coat of snow covering my imperfections. Snow has a way of making everything seem perfect. A dirt road filled with potholes can turn into a glowing path bordered by frosty aspens overnight. A few months into winter turns the bare brown peaks of summer into a white wonderland that seems to give us a glimpse of something we’ll see in heaven. We see the pureness of the white, the clean lines that cover the rocky and bumpy layers below. This summer was my first summer in Colorado. I still remember looking at all the mountains and different trails after the snow had melted. I kept thinking “So this is what these mountains look like without snow on them!” In fact, what I was seeing in the summer was the what the mountains really were, the true characteristics of them. Because I had always seen them in the winter, I had forgotten, or even never knew, what truly was beneath the temporary coating of snow.

I think my life has been like this for way too long. There have always been things about myself that I didn’t like. There have always been certain temptations that I always seemed to give in to. Many times I have tried to change these things about myself, to make myself a better person. Most of those times though I’ve just been blanketing my life with a fresh coat of snow. I’ve found ways to occupy my time in more productive ways. I’ve read more, tried to learn more, written more. From the outside it may have looked like I had it all figured out, but the reality was that beneath the fresh coat of snow still lay a bunch of mud and rocks and potholes. By finding ways to run from the bad things in my life, I wasn’t changing them, I was just hiding them. I think I had good intentions, but real change doesn’t happen by running (unless the change you are looking for is to lose a few pounds around the waistline. Then I would recommend running). But seriously, I think change comes from facing your problems head on, from learning why you do what you do. Running from them may look good on the surface, but the same problems will still be there underneath waiting for the snow to melt.

So now I’m trying to go from having my life look like a Colorado winter, to looking something more like Antarctica. What little snow does fall there tends to stay around for a long time. I’m sick of letting my life constantly change back and forth like the changing of the seasons. I want my life to be a permanent change. I want to be different in many ways, and I want the new me to stick around for a while, like the snow in Antarctica. I hear that the penguins there get to play around wherever they want all day, they aren’t stuck to going down the same slide over and over again. I wouldn’t mind hanging out with those guys either. Yeah, this blog definitely isn’t my best, but it’s pretty personal, so if you made it to the end you are either as bored as I am, or you really want to know what’s going on in my head. For your sake, I hope it’s the first one of those!

I’ve been thinking…

Wow, it’s been a while. It’s been almost a month since I’ve written anything, and over a month since I’ve written anything worthwhile (I guess it could be debated whether or not I’ve ever written anything worthwhile, but I’ll give myself the benefit of the doubt and say that I every once in a while I put out a readable blog). My excuse for not writing is that I’ve been deep in thought this past month, and I’ve been sorting through a lot of ideas and emotions internally instead of writing them down. I never said it was a plausible excuse, but it’s the best I’ve got so I’m sticking with it. I did see something on Saturday morning though that made me think about an idea that has been pulling at my heart, and I immediately wanted to write about it. Believe it or not, tonight is the first free time I’ve had since then. Turns out I have something resembling a life outside of checking my facebook and writing a blog that no one reads. It’s not an enviable life, that’s for sure, but nonetheless I have been keeping busy and now as you can see I am spending my free time dabbling in self deprecating humor while putting off getting to the serious topic I sat down to write in the first place. So without further delay, I’ll conclude the entertainment portion of the blog and get down to the serious stuff that all three of you have been waiting for…

We are terrible encouragers. When I say we, I think firstly of myself and then about the rest of our society. Don’t get me wrong, I know a few people who have the gift of seeing the best in people and naturally lifting others up. However, those people are rare, and I am certainly not one of them. In our world, encouragers are the exception, not the rule. Instead our world is a critical one, shallow and cynical. The headlines surrounding the check-out lane at the grocery store don’t read “Jon says Kate is a great woman and wishes her nothing but the best” or “Keep your head up Ms. Aniston, we know you’ll find true love one day.” If we really think about it, not only are we not naturally encouraging, but we seem to naturally find it a lot easier to be critical of others than to simply say nothing. None of us wants to believe that about ourselves, but I bet most of us can think of a couple times where we’ve been more critical than we’d like to think. When that guy at work that we don’t particularly like gets the promotion instead of us, we mumble to coworkers about how he is so unqualified and underserving. I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever heard someone gossip something good about someone. The phrase ‘talking behind someone’s back’ is a highly negative term only because behind someone’s back we almost always say highly negative things. At my job, everyone agrees that our boss is terrible with people and is completely underqualified for her job. The negative comments fly all over the place, but not once have I ever heard someone say “Yeah, she may not be great at what she does, but let’s all step it up in our own jobs so she doesn’t have to worry about us and can focus on improving in other aspects of her job as general manager.” Ha, I laugh just thinking of the looks someone would get if they said that. I’m just as much a part of the problem as anyone else, yet I’m supposed to be different right? Aren’t Christians supposed to be loving, forgiving, and encouraging? Does anyone believe that anymore? Unfortunately, most people view Christians as judgmental, intolerant, and critical. Looks to me like those three words are the exact opposite of how we are really meant to live. How could that happen???

Don’t misunderstand me, I really do want to be encouraging, and there are times when I am good at it. Many times I have been told that my words have helped someone out, or my actions were a good example. The problem is that I am not always naturally like that. In fact, I tend to think that I am naturally more critical, which is the antithesis of encouragement. I am often quick to point out what’s wrong with something instead of looking for a way I can improve the situation. Sometimes it’s little things, like just the other day I saw a guy whose belt fit his pants really awkwardly and I leaned over to my friend and said something silly about the guy’s appearance. What was the point of that, to be funny? Yeah, the guy never heard it, but why is it programmed in my head to say anything at all!? Other times it’s big things, like with work, when everyone is negative I jump on the bandwagon and become critical of any and every thing that I don’t agree with. There’s going to be lots in this world that I don’t agree with and if I become critical of all of that, I imagine I’ll live my life completely the opposite of how God wants me to live. There are plenty of verses in the New Testament that speak of encouragement, many of them written by Paul who was probably the best encourager of his time. The guy risked jail and even death to go around encouraging different nations about a different life and full life through Christ. One of the stories in the Old Testament really stands out to me about encouragement though. Moses had led the Israelites for most of his life, and had given his life up to be their leader even when they clearly didn’t deserve or appreciate it. Twice Moses wanted to take his people into a new land and twice God essentially said to him “No, you aren’t going to go into that land, but encourage your assistant Joshua because one day he will lead your people there.” I can only imagine if this was said to me, “Hey Josh, you know that dream house you’ve been working so hard for, saving for, and praying and asking for, well you’re not getting it. Your buddy, he’s going to get it and you’ll never be allowed in, so I want you to prepare and encourage him to go after it and get it instead.” Needless to say, I probably wouldn’t handle that too well, and I surely wouldn’t want to encourage someone else to go get it. I can picture myself saying something like this “Hey bro, that house, it’s not as good as I thought it was, so I’m going to bail on it. You can go for it if you want, but I don’t know why you’d want to. 7 bedrooms, 8.5 baths with a huge yard and a giant swimming pool, that sounds great but that’s a lot of stuff to maintain. Think of all the hard work you’d have to do just to keep it up. I’m not sure you could do it or would want to, right?” Maybe some of you would say the same sort of thing, maybe that’s human nature. Maybe not. Either way it’s not how God wants us to live.

We should be uplifters always. We should want to make the lives of others better, isn’t that what life is all about? Why are we so selfish? I saw this commercial on tv, and it was kind of like the final straw, the last thing in a long line of things that have pushed me to think more about what it means to be a constant encourager. Here it is –

I admit, the commercial actually worked on me. It made me question myself, would I be like the pianist? I’d like to think I would be, and at times I really think I am. But there are other times when maybe I’m stressed out or surrounding myself with negativity that I’d probably yell “Who let this kid on the stage, seriously, someone call social services because not only did these parents torture their kid by making him come to a piano concert when he’s 8, but they couldn’t even keep track of him when he’s clearly the only kid in the building!” I definitely don’t want to be that guy, I want to be the encourager, the guy who takes a bad situation and turns it into good, even if its not for my benefit but for someone else’s. How can I get there, and stay there? That’s what I’ve been thinking about, and hopefully soon I’ll have an answer.

Facelift and a New Addition

This morning I decided to give the blog a much needed facelift, and I also decided that if I was really going to keep writing then it was time to make a new addition. No not these guys –
That’s New Edition, with an ‘e’. Come on, don’t act like you didn’t immediately think of them when you heard the words ‘new addition’. Even if for some crazy reason you didn’t think of them, you know your day is better because you got to see some incredible dancing and take a trip back in time with a classic song. You can thank me later.
Anyway, as for the blog change, the theme I was using was really narrow and only stretched about halfway across the screen. This made the print really small and difficult to read, and this can be the only imaginable reason why this blog gets an average of 1.7 readers per day. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the content on the blog, it can’t. Who wouldn’t want to read about a single 28 year old guy getting excited over the fact that the highlight of his day was watching a music video that was meant to be watched by teenage girls over 2 decades ago? Like I said, it’s clearly not the content of the blog that’s the problem, so I expect to see the stats go way up with the release of this recent change. Like New Edition in the 80s, keep the hits coming.
As for the addition, I have decided to add a Twitter account to round out the ways I can post almost useless information on the World Wide Web. Hold on a second, you may be saying “This guy already has a facebook account and he writes a totally awesome blog, why does he need twitter? What does he think he is… popular (gasp)!?” I know, I know, as if you need another thing to follow me on, mom (I’m convinced that she’s 1.4 of the readers per day showing up on my blog stats, the other 0.3 is people who inadvertently ended up here after they searched google for “brett favre” or “can I have sex on a motorcycle”. I wish I was joking). But seriously, I have always thought of Twitter as one of two things. Either it was a place for celebrities to post what they were doing for their stalkers fans to read, or it was for regular people who want to be celebrities and have other people care about what they were doing every second. Don’t get me wrong, twitter still is these things, and I am almost positive that Twitter was created by stalkers. Think about it -

“Hey girl, you know how we have this huge, borderline obsessive crush on Ashton?”
“OMG, DO I!!! It’s too bad that we don’t really, nor will we ever, know him well enough to get to talk him in real life”
“Well that’s just it, I have this great idea. Why don’t we create a website where he can write about what he’s doing at every moment of the day? Then it will be just like we are friends with him and he is really talking to us.”
“You’re crazy, why would he ever do that?”
“I know it sounds nuts, but we’ll create a way for him to count how many people follow him and he’ll get excited about having millions of fans. He’ll be so focused on how popular he is that he’ll forget how ridiculous it is to tell complete strangers where he is going for coffee and at what time.”
“Whoa, this just might work. How do we start it?!”

And so we have Twitter. Like I said, I always held Twitter in a somewhat negative regard, but recently I have seen a few good examples of it put to use. People on facebook have been posting quotes or just ideas that they have read on a friend’s twitter account. There are a lot of pastors on twitter, and I have read a few things that have stopped to make me think about myself, or even better, think about God. If Twitter can be used to make people think about life, then that has to be a good thing. So I signed up for it, because I want to read some of these things that people write, and also I feel like I may have a thing or two to add as well. I promise you will never see any posts like this from me on twitter “I’m freaking out because I can’t find my iphone charger, help!”, or “OMG, sat next to Matthew McConaughey at lunch. He totally left a bite of his burger as he left – I grabbed it before the waiter tossed it!!!” That’s not my style. I’m not important enough to tell you what I’m doing all the time. However, if you do want to know what’s going on inside this oft wandering mind of mine, then feel free to follow me on twitter. I figure that if I can make even 1.7 people stop to think about themselves or about God, then that’s better than doing nothing. If you have anything interesting to post, I’d love to follow you too. I’m not sure how this whole thing works, but my twitter url is http://twitter.com/sonotimportant