8 Talents|Doing what I can with all that I’ve been given.

You might have heard the sad news about Steven Curtis Chapman’s youngest daughter. SCC is one of Amy’s and my favorite artists. His music comes from deep life experiences and an amazing ability to put them to song. With the passing of his youngest daughter his latest single provides a great perspective on life, the brevity of it, and the value of every child, even though it was written well before the accident. Here’s a few videos and some thoughts to follow.

This first video is the story behind Cinderella.

This video is the actual music video with another version of the story above following it.

Faith Evangelical Free Church had teacher training this evening for the summer Sunday school session. The question, “Why Children?” kept popping up in my mind all day long so I centered the teacher training around that question and came up with four answers.
1.) Tomorrow isn’t promised. Thankfully, Maria Sue Chapman had parents who loved the Lord and loved her and led her to Him, most children don’t. What if this were to happen to our neighbor’s child or even our own? As the church we are obligated to love the world’s children just as Jesus did.

2.) Investing in children produces a great return. Our society, for better or worse, is fixated on results. Eight five percent, or 17 out of 20 adults who believe in Jesus did so before the age of 15. To verify this I took a straw pole of the teachers at training tonight, who are a very diverse crowd for this session, and every single one of them, except me, trusted Jesus before the age of 15. It makes sense that we should invest our resources where we will get the greatest gain, children.

3.) Jesus made a priority out of children. Time and again in the gospels you see Jesus making a priority out of children. He often tabled “grown up” issues to attend to the children in is presence. He told everyone that we must become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven.

4.) Children enrich our lives. I have some great stories for this one so I am going to save it for its own post.

All of this brings me to the question, “Are we willing to notice life?” Especially pointing that question to the children we encounter both regularly and randomly. I know the Chapman’s are experiencing deep pain, I will not pretend to even be able to come close to understanding it. Yet, I am excited to see the fruit that God will work out of this. Imagine how many adoptions will be inspired by this tragedy through the Chapman’s organization, Shaohannah’s Hope. As a result of Maria’s untimely death many will have a chance at eternal life. Imagine the music God will inspire through this that will comfort so many who have or will lose loved one’s. Imagine what it is like for Maria Sue to be sitting in the lap of Jesus.

Are you excited about seeing the world come to know Jesus? Close your eyes and picture 100 people of different tribes, tongues and nations that you would like to see come to know Jesus. A vast majority of the people that you are imagining should be children.

This blog had a long period of silence from January through April. That was primarily due to one very large project I was working on. As I mentioned in the previous post Amy and I have launched a new business. We do not envision this business ever growing to the point of a full time income, it is just a way for us to get Amy home sooner by paying off our students loans.

A new Web site for Faith Evangelical Free Church in Manhattan, KS was that big project that kept me away from 8 Talents. The site is now 100% live

In an attempt to take care of our student loans as quickly as possible Amy and I have embarked on a new adventure. RGB Innovative is open for business. If you have any digital communication projects that you need some help with contact us and we will see if we can help you out.

We will do web site consulting and design, photography work, print design, and photo stories.

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.

Ecclesiastes 7:2

A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God.  This is man’s greatest tragedy and God’s heaviest grief.

A.W. Tozer

I have changed this blog to a new look, but haven’t got all the kinks worked out yet and bed is calling. Thanks for bearing with me.

I am not a big political person.  I read a lot and stay informed but I often feel tore.  I am finding myself becoming fairly apathetic towards politics as I see the charade they have become.  Please don’t take this as a political post, it is more a post on Christian character.

One thing I can say that I don’t like is when Christianity becomes a poster identity to advocate or advance a candidate.  Show me your faith, don’t print it on a flyer or a poster.  Yet, when I looked at the attached images I wondered what I would look like on those fliers.  How often am I a Christian in word but not deed?

The sad thing about this particular example is how they are using 1 Cor 13 as their tag line but they removed the greatest of the three, love, and replaced it with the campaign theme of change.  Sad because love is obviously not the focus, the person is.  We personally, as Christians, should never be the focus, our God and love should always be.

Sometimes I am amazed by the creations of man. I was listening to the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack score this morning and there was a deep cello that was very soothing. It as soon joined by multiple violins sending various harmonious sounds into the score. After the violins had their time in the spotlight hammers striking finely tuned piano strings across many octaves completed a complex masterpiece of crescendos and decrescendos. Everything together created music that made me feel a range of emotions all at once. I was amazed by whoever had the genius to put that together. Recently, I was in New York City and marveled at the architectural riches. I was amazed by a train tunnel that went under a river, and had been there for a hundred years. There were buildings that stood strong and high. I visited the famous Fifth Ave. Apple Store, amazing!

After dwelling on God’s creativeness today I realize, in relation to my reaction to the things above, just how easily I am amused, how easily I am distracted.

There are a lot of theories on how many galaxies there are in the universe. One source states a conservative estimate to be around 350,000,000,000 (that would be billion with a b). To put it into perspective if God wanted to name galaxies after every single human on the planet you would have 54 entire galaxies named after you. Again 350 is said to be a conservative estimate.

Let’s put this is perspective. To do that I have to introduce you to a form of measurement I have never heard of until I looked it up today. A galaxy’s size is measured by a parsec.

Light travels at 186,282 miles per second.

A light year is the distance light travels over the course of a year. Thus one light year equals about 5.8 trillion miles.

A parsec is 3.262 light years or 19 trillion miles.

Most galaxies are between 1,000 and 100,000 parsecs in diameter. Galaxies are typically separated by millions of parsecs.

A small galaxy may have as few as 10 million stars, a big one might have around 1 trillion stars.

Our galaxy the Milky way is 100,000 light years in diameter and has between 200 and 400 billion stars. That is 200-400 billion suns in our galaxy alone!

And here I sit on planet earth spinning around often slipping into thinking about how important and “big” I am.

Why did God do this? I don’t know. Most people in history didn’t even have the chance to ponder the enormity of the universe past what they could see (which is enough). The only thing I could think of was that God delights in His creativity and it gives us one more opportunity to say, “WOW, No WAY!”

Why do I share this here? I don’t know, you’ll have to find your own application. I am just amazed.

Check out these pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.