Afterglow

So yeah, your face really does glow after that first kiss.

On May 23, 2008, I wedded the love of my life, Lana Marie.  Tonight we have completed the first of (Lord willing) many years together.  I praise my God for the love He has lavished on me and my wife.  Thank You, Father, for this good and perfect gift!

To my Lana, I say:

The springtime's arriving, the blossoms appear
The rain's gone away, and our love song is here
So come with me, darling, my beautiful one
'Cause the winter is over, and we've just begun

I love you.

Thank You

My lovely wife is lying in bed right now, not feeling good at all today, very tired and hurting (nearly) all over. Praise the Lord, I didn't have to go to work today and I get to stay home and be with her. She has been awesome this past week. Somebody was congratulating me last night on my role in our church's Easter program, and I told them the truth: Lana did the thankless work behind the scenes for it. Well, I say thankless, but I have thanked her for it and I wanted to do it publicly as well, because I'm proud of her.

So, my Lana, thank you...

• for patiently enduring eight consecutive evenings away from home (ending last night).
• for patiently enduring two and a half months of husband-beardedness, even though you would MUCH rather me be clean-shaven.
• for working hard to improve a horrid wig that turned out to be the only one usable for the part I was playing; a lot of people still heavily criticized the wig, not knowing how bad it originally was and how much you labored to make it work for me. You did a great job, love, and I was pleased with it!
• for testing out makeup on a willing guinea pig (uh, thank you also to my brother Caleb!) not once but twice.
• for going to Wal-Mart more times than we thought humanly possible, always to get some other thing we had just discovered we needed for the program.
• for constantly encouraging and blessing me with smiles, prayers, kind words, selfless actions.
• for spending over an hour before each performance, putting on my makeup and helping me with my costume.
• for helping me keep up with my various costumes and props, and making sure that we put them in the right places before each performance.
• for doing all this while also singing in the choir in the program.
• for scrubbing, exfoliating, washing, and tanning me at various points before and after the program.
• for cutting my hair and beard last night so I could shave the beard and you could feel my smooth face again!
• for being a loving, submissive, patient help-meet, which is nothing new; it just shone out even more brightly this last week.

All praise ultimately goes to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He has created my wife, equipped her to love and serve me, and has begun this good work in her. And He will carry it through to the day of completion in Christ Jesus.

Thank you so much, my Lana; I'm so proud of you, and I'm so thankful for all you've done for me, especially with the Easter program! I love you so much! :%

A Father's Thoughts

The Baby Story Thus Far

A Father's Thoughts
I pray that God uses me in whatever way he sees fit. It excites me to look back on my life and be able to point out specific times when I can clearly see how he used me. In some cases I could see it as it was happening; in others I still can't see what he was doing through me. But I praise him that he does use me as his vessel, and pray that I will always be useful to him.

It's a strange emotion, then, to discover that my Lord has used me and my wonderful wife to create a new life. Over the past two days, I have meditated on this wonderful mystery. Lana and I have conceived, not a fetal blob, but a complete person, who will one day (if the Lord wills) burp and cry and dance, and run and chew and laugh, and ask and wonder and learn, and love and lose and weep, and listen and understand and believe. Out of the love of a husband and wife comes a new love - tenderly we will give it and slowly receive it.

Only eight and a half months have passed since I left my father and mother to cleave to my wife, and already I foresee the day when my precious child will leave Lana and me and join in marriage with another. Our task is to prepare him or her for that day, for that person, for that life. In the meantime, we will enjoy life with the third member of our family.

Praise you, Father, for the child you have granted me and Lana. May we never fail to remember that he or she belongs to you, and that you have entrusted us to raise him or her up in the knowledge and instruction of the Lord. May we one day send our child out from us, a flaming arrow to bring a little more light into the darkness of this world.

Readers, please pray for our three-person family. My new highest priority is doing everything I can to protect my wife and our baby during this fragile period of pregnancy. But ultimately it is the Lord's to give or to take away, to preserve or to extinguish. Pray that we will trust him completely and praise him in good time or ill.

And yes, I am jacked about being a dad! Praise the Lord!!!

Reconstruction Continues

Hey folks,

Ahhh, so the format revamp isn't going like I wanted it to. I realize the "fix" probably didn't fix anything for those of you who don't have extra-long monitors. So...I'll keep working on it. When I have time, anyway.

Here's what I do have time to work on right now, because I'm getting paid sweet green for it:
http://www.wkusports.com/SportSelect.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=5400&SPID=2259&SPSID=28997
If you're wondering what in the world I'm doing poring over the men's basketball roster for Western Kentucky, well, it's my job. A small part of my job. Hopefully I'll get the chance to explain later.

Anyways, shalom out, and here's a Bible passage Lana and I have been chewing on recently:

Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness"; and again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile." So then, no more boasting about men! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.

1 Corinthians 3:18-23 (NIV)

That snorkel's been just like a snorkel to me

OK, so I'm succumbing to the trend and using a quote as my post title. But life's too short to try to actually dream up an original title. Don't try to question that rationale...

Been reading (in very limited spare time) a terrific book called Culture Making by Andy Crouch. It came in on the stock cart at Solid Rock one day and caught my eye (I was working at Solid Rock then, for those who don't know). I picked it up, read a few pages, and immediately knew that it would be one of the most important books I would ever read. Bought it on the spot (with employee discount). Fantabulous book - if you're at all interested in culture, you must read this book. Gives a fresh yet biblical perspective. I haven't finished it yet, but I plan on reading it again many times once I'm done.

Another terrific book is Sinner by Ted Dekker, which released at the beginning of this month. If you haven't read anything this guy has written, you need to, but his stories are not for the faint of heart. His stories depict Darkness, but that just allows the Light to shine through them all the more brilliantly. This guy is one of my storytelling heroes and Sinner is another spectacular tale from him.
If you're interested in reading Dekker, I recommend starting with the Circle Trilogy. Three novels, two worlds, one story. After reading it, you may never look at the Gospel the same ol' way.
Enough about him...

I've been redesigning the blog, and working on getting it so it doesn't cut anything off. I think I've finally fixed that problem; if you're still seeing things cut off, let me know please. I like the wider format as it allows you more flexibility in putting things on the page, but I realize that some people have smaller monitors than I do and can't see it all at once. You SHOULD be able to scroll horizontally now.

Hoping to someday soon use this blog to share my thoughts about theology, "the church in America" (and why that's such a terribly un-useful term), telling stories, and much more. My wife and I have had some stimulating conversations, influenced by the writings of Piper, Dekker, Lewis, Tolkien, and many others; I'd love to share them on my blog. Right now there's just way too much to do.

God has been blowing my mind lately. Again, wish I had time to discuss it here, but since I don't, let me just throw out a word that my Sunday night class is growing to know well: assumptions. How many assumptions fill our minds and dictate the way we live, without us ever thinking about them? Are assumptions part of a godly mindset? What would happen if we (prayerfully) questioned even the most basic assumptions about our lives? about God? about the world?

On Sunday nights we've been looking at assumptions that are often held in Christendom. Stuff like "The Lord helps those who help themselves" and "Jesus looked like us (meaning WASP, that is)" and "We're not supposed to hate." We're taking these assumptions and holding them up to the light of the Bible. The question, ultimately, is not what has man said? or what have I always believed? or what makes sense to me? The question is what does God say? We're digging into the Word and coming up with some interesting and sometimes unexpected answers.

Ehh, I want to just break down and write a long post about assumptions now. But it's bedtime, and my wife and I definitely need the rest. Toodleoo and shalom out, my Hebrew homies, till then.

Stop, hey, what's that sound?

What's goin down, tell me what's goin down
You wanna know just what's goin down?
Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's goin down
- TobyMac

You just thought I'd never post again.

You might be right.

Naw, I don't intend to call it quits on the blog just yet, but then again, this is my first post in nearly a month. It's a busy life, and I haven't had much time to be on the Internet, much less writing blog posts.

We have made three filming outings for the most anticipated film of 2007, er, I mean, 2008 (it could even be 2009). The result: We have, in the director's estimation, completed over half of the remaining filming. We still probably have four or five days of filming ahead of us at least; don't even try to make my math match up, just trust that it does.

Three-fourths of the film is edited and I'm dipping my proverbial toes in the water with the score. Once the filming is finished, it's still going to be several months at least before we finally unveil Hunted to the world. But I believe that we will unveil it, and I'm excited about that.

FtF is less than two weeks away, and I'm pumped about what the Lord has for us this year. Pray for our group; there's a spiritual war going on and I pray that God, not Satan, wins this battle. And please come out prayerfully and expectantly on Saturday, August 23, and share this exciting day with us.

I have a new job, and hopefully I'll get a chance to post more about that later. Working on transitioning from The Solid Rock to this new thing. I'm slightly scared and really excited, because I know that it's what God has for me.

So that's a little bit of what's goin down, for now. Shalom out.

Hunted Strikes Back

Tomorrow

July 16

AD 2008

the most anticipated film of the year

2007 --

which has become

the most anticipated film of the year

2008 --

shall resume principal photography

after an eight-month hiatus

and there shall be much rejoicing

HUNTED IS COMING, BABY!!!

hee hee hee....

This is Luke's wife posting for him, before sister Nan starts to remind how wonderful blog posts are :P
And no, he didn't ask me to, but no, I didn't hack in :^D

Well, what's up with Luke: he's busy working 31-39 hours a week, exercising (almost) daily with his wife (at her request) eating a lot of homemade food (and raving about it), and doing various other things that married life involves.
He's learning to be the head of his own household, and doing a marvelous job. He's set up a budget that we're working with this month, he takes good care of his wife and makes sure she drinks lots of water and takes her vitamins and supplements. She needs a lot of reminding. Once this weekend, he cleaned up the mess after his wife gagged on her supplement drink (and it choked it up all over the floor). She nearly cried to see him bent over mopping it up, but then she laughed b/c she felt like a baby who'd spat out her formula.
Oh, I teased him the other day b/c 'we've got a teenager in the house', but he's a really strong, God-fearing man. and I love him a lot.
Other news... Luke got a raise last week! We were very excited. And we celebrated with pound cake, which was wonderful and also exciting :^)
He'll be home in about an hour, and of course we're both looking forward to it.
Miss you, my love!!!
You can delete this post if it bothers you, but I was trying to sign into my own account on your laptop, and it put me to your dashboard, so.... :^P