Koi pond: check

I just discovered the "gadget" that I added on the right hand side of the screen.  The fish will follow the cursor, and if you click your mouse/track pad button you can feed them.  It's completely pointless, but I have a "slight" fascination with Koi  and it's one of my goals in life is to have a Koi pond.  I just couldn't resist adding this to the blog.  I don't think this qualifies to get it marked off my bucket list, but it did bring a small measure of joy to my heart. :D  Enjoy!

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Money making scheme... I mean idea.

I'm so excited right now!

Well as I wrote before, I started attending the International House of Prayer University. When I started trying to figure out how to bank roll this whole operation, I spoke with my friend Robert about a couple of ideas, and he really encouraged me to try designing, printing, and selling my own t-shirts. I've wanted to learn how to screen print for a long time so this was a great time to give it a go. Well, that just happened. Over the Christmas break while I was home before school started, I was doing the research and preparing to get started on this. At the same time Micheal's Crafts Store came out with an outstanding coupon! Any one item 40% off. I was looking at about $100 worth of stuff that I would need to make the screens and ink, not even including the shirts, so we gathered several more of the coupons from neighbors, and I bought my materials one at a time. Sometimes I would go to multiple stores in the same day, or bring my mom with me so she could use one coupon too. It took longer, but I saved a good deal of money, 58 bucks  (!!! Do you even know how much Chipotle that could buy me? ), because the first week, each receipt also came with a 50% off any one item for the next week. Awesome! God provides in so many ways, He's really good at it!

All that to say; last night I printed them all up. It went a lot faster then I expected, but it was also a lot harder then I expected too. (I dunno if I've ever come across that combination before.)

Thursday afternoon, I came home to a surprise! I was so excited to get started!












So I gathered up all my supplies and I was ready to go! Note: the 2 liter because I was expecting this whole process to take a lot more time then it actually did. I got the actual printing done in under three hours, but the ironing to set the ink permanent today took several more than that. The after math of destruction and paper towels was pretty amazing too, but I'll spare you that image and let your imagination runamuck with it.

Each one is a little different since I did a method called a "split fountain" where I placed both the white and the blue ink together to create the transition of color. The fact that I'm a total newbie helped in that area too. It's a little unpredictable, and I like that. Each one has more of a "hand made" feel then most the the machine produced in mass quantity things that are all around us now. I'm not hating on machine production, but I really enjoy the uniqueness that comes when things are created individually by hand. The little quirks and differences are so neat to see when all together. Trying to trouble shoot on the fly kept me on my toes too: Is the ink drying too fast on my screen? How can I get ride of water that's dripped on the screen and smearing the ink? Do I have enough ink to do another run? Dear God, I need your help! I distinctly remembering praying "Jesus, you're the best screen printer in the world. You know all about it, please help."

There were several that got messed up along the way, but I had ordered a couple extras of each size to take that into account. I still managed to have enough successes to fill the orders I've gotten for each size, and a I have a few mediums left over too in case anyone wanted to jump on the bandwagon. It was so cool seeing them laid out on literally almost every horizontal surface in me room. It reminded me again how much I enjoy making things, and looking at the end product afterwards.










I wonder if that even a fraction of what God feels when He looks at the Earth and all of us. He's definitely got an edge on me. I mean, He's been doing it a lot longer, has made a lot more stuff, and everything comes out just like He wanted it to. But if I can get so excited over several t-shirts, surely He gets much more excited over me. Life is so much more fun, and enjoyable when the fact that God enjoys me starts to become a reality to me. I love being an artist, in relationship with the most creative person ever!

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Why I like journaling

I’ve been journaling, nearly every day, since this past July, so about 6 months now, give or take a few days. And it has been so helpful! This might feed into my near hoarder-like tendencies as a way of holding onto thoughts, events, experiences, but I don’t plan on worrying about it at least until I have a box full of journals. (Could it really be? Is there one thing I’m actually not worried about? Praise The Lamb!)

It’s so nice to be able to go back and read things I’ve written before as a way of remembering things that the Lord has shown me in the past that I’ve forgotten. Sometimes it doesn’t even take me a long time to forget. Just a few days and I can go back in my journal like a time capsule and read as if for the first time, things that blew my mind or made me cry just days before. But that’s not what has me excited today.

Today I realized in what a great way journaling has improved my thought life. It’s amazing to me how many fallacies, intellectual inconsistencies, and wrong doctrines I’ve found even in my own thinking just by writing out my thoughts and prayers on a regular basis. The surprising part isn’t that I have wrong thinking. I became quite aware of the reality of my own inconsistencies during the internship at the International House of Prayer, but what’s surprising to me is that I’m able to detect them on my own. Previously, I’ve been largely un-aware of own false mindsets because they were the lenses through which I perceived everything else. But by writing them out it makes everything more concrete, and once it’s out, I feel like I get a better perspective of it. I’m able to then see the whole thought in it’s entirety and am better able to judge it as biblical or not.

For instance, today I was able to see how I have been subconsciously disqualifying myself as one whom the Lord can/is willing to use to minister to His Bride, the Church. Now I wouldn’t have agreed that I thought this way if you asked me, but looking at how I was processing some thoughts of mine, that’s exactly what I was doing. Last Friday I found a similar fallacy, when writing out my prayers about a job to pay my way through Bible school I asked the Lord if a seemingly shut door “is this Your doing or something else?” Once I wrote it out, I saw how absurd that question was. There is nothing that goes against His will, or can resist His plans. A better question and posture of prayer would really be to ask ‘is this a closed door to protect and shepherd me into Your best, or does this need more perseverance to see if the door is truly closed and not give up too early.’

And truly, most of what I’ve posted here on the blog was filtered through my journal in one for or another. So I hope I’m not the only one benefiting from my journaling, but even if that’s the case, it’d still be worth it.

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The infinitude of God.

I want to tell you about a book I've been reading that is blowing up my mind. A. W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy is awesome! I would insist it as a must read for anyone who has a pulse. First off, I didn't even know that "infinitude" was a word. I'm still slightly in shock that it is, playing with it in my mouth to train my tongue to pronounce it correctly. The vocabulary expansion alone is reason enough to read this book. I Recently I read chapter 8, titled "The Infinitude of God". I'll just share with you what I journaled right after reading.

Wow! This is really good! Tozer talks about how God is limitless, only He is. He is without measure, exalting our vision of Him because He alone is uncontainable by our human speech. Language cannot define Him, measure Him, describe Him completely. Our minds cannot fully conceive of all of who He is. To attempt to fully define and conceptualize Him is to create a god of much less significance and power.
Tozer also brings in our hope in Christ, and how it is His very infinitude, that gives us hope. How had I become so blind to this hope in Christ, which is the very reason and purpose of His coming?

Here is an excerpt from page 47: " God's gifts in nature have their limitations. They are finite because they have been created, but the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus is as limitless as God. The christian man possesses God's own life and shares His infinitude with Him. In God there is life enough for all and time enough to enjoy it. Whatever is possessed of natural life runs through it's cycle from birth to death and ceases to be, but the life of God returns upon itself and ceases never. and this is life eternal: to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.
The mercy of God is infinite too, and the man who has felt the grinding pain of inward guilt knows that this is more than academic. "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." Abounding sin is the terror of the world, but abounding grace is the hope of mankind. However sin may abound it still has it's limits, for it is product of finite minds and hearts; but God's "much more" introduces us to infinitude. Against our deep creature-sickness stands God's infinite ability to cure.
The christian witness through the centuries has been that "God so loved the world..."; it remains for us to see that love in the light of God's infinitude. His love is measureless. It is more" it is boundless. It has no bounds because it is not a thing but a facet of the essential nature of God. His love is something He is, and because He is infinite that love can enfold the whole created world in itself and have room for ten thousand times ten thousand worlds beside."

This is awesome. I've wondered how His love could be so expansive to even envelope me in my sin; which seems so large to me. But to understand that His love is boundless because He is boundless, and love is who He is, is very refreshing. He cannot separate Himself from Himself! He doesn't act like He wants to, He is acting, doing, interacting with us out of who He is, not who He is trying to be. Could this be why He states in his word that mercy triumphs over judgement in James 2:13? He judges because it is right and good for Him to do so, but He is merciful. The mercy outlast the judgement.

This also makes me think of Audra Lynn's album Vow. At one point, spoken over music is a phrase that echos in my mind often: "Justice carries mercy, and mercy acts in love. Love defines the means, by which the justice does."

Daddy, I thank You and praise you for Your identity, who You are. You are holy, kind, truthful and loving because of who You are. You are not putting on an act. You never change. You will always be this way. You are always good. You always and only do what is right. Holy Spirit help me to know this every moment of every day. Amen.