98,000 things to write about except church history and ethics...

Sincerly, there is about 98,000 things going through my mind that I right now would like to just sit down and pour into the binary code of my computer, in fact this is one of them. In a little over a month I will step foot into not only a couple diffrent countires but in fact two diffrent continents. Istanbul, Turkey; it used to be Constantinople, how cool is that. Ten days I get to spend over there doing missions stuff, i am quite exicted, I mean james bond has been there. Originally it was to be mother russia that i was to venture to and just because of who i am i began studying and learning the russian language. Then would't you know i've just about got some great basics of russian down when, God appears as if he is changing his mind and says, no no, lets go to turkey. So the Russia trip gets postponed, which means canceled and i'm off to turkey. Oh, and it's not that God changed his mind about where He was sending me He is just forcing me to do something directly told me to do two years ago that i haven't gotten around to doing; He told me, at summer camp in Ridgecrest, NC, to start learning alot of languages; apparently He wasn't joking. So now that i am semi trilingual little Engish, poco espanol, nemnoga paruski (if you can't read in tounges it's little enlgish, little spanish, little russian (transliterated russian)) and i've just started on some wonderful Turkish, marhaba, which is transliterated for hello and all i can say in turkish at the moment and i've also got the CD's to learn french, hey if nothing else it's "romantic." So beyond the language barriers I had this slight question about how am i gonna go to russia, now turkey with my unemployed budget? It is good to remember here that when God is quaterback and says hike your job is to be the receiver and start running and he'll throw you the ball when its time for you to catch it. ( a football analogy in baseball season, eh there playing football in europe right now so it works) so i sent out some letters, and of course they all have the russia deatils and i find out the trip is canceled a couple days after i send the out, i procrastinate and still can't win. but money has already flowed in and yesterday i spent 1000 bucs on a couple of peices of paper to get me on a winged machine that pretends to be a bird. The funny part about it all is, it didn't bother me at all to drop a $1000 with a click of the mouse. Which reminds me of one thing i must complain about, when God provides money don't waste it on stuff that costs more than it should. a buddy of mine is going to austraila for the summer to work as a childrens minister and going through the people orgainizing the tirp it will cost him two grand for his round trip, out of curiousity i priced tickets for the dates, with a couple more stops one can get to austriala for $750... why waste $1250? I mean you could almost fly three people for the price of one. Why??? that makes my head hurt to think about that oh, well. Well that pulls the number down to about 97,995 or so and i still don't want ot write about john wesley or my ethics paper, hey i've got a week, plenty of time....

Father, Son, and What's His Name...

It really ought not to surprise me, but I, in all naive hope still let it. There is a beautiful hymn that is sung quite frequently: “Glorify Thy Name.” I really love this simple little hymn. It has three verses and the only difference in the lyrics the first word of each line: Father, Jesus, Spirit. We sang that hymn in chapel this morning, and as I was singing the second line a thought hit me in my spirit. We are not going to sing the verse to the Holy Spirit. Sure enough after the second line just the instruments played the entire time we would have sung the stanza on the Spirit, and I just wanted to cry. The Holy Spirit within me grieved for the rest of chapel. It really should not have shocked me I mean this is a Baptist school is it not? Truly it has been a long time since I have felt the Holy Spirit move on this little campus; oh, how I wish God would breath revival over this campus in spite of our disregard for Him and His will. I am quite hesitant to say “Thus saith the Lord,” but I feel as if God is saying now what He said to the church at Laodicea in Revelation 3:15-16: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.” Forgive us Lord, show us your Spirit’s power once more…