Wholly Yours

The Lord is compassionate and merciful,
slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love.
He will not constantly accuse us,
nor remain angry forever.
He does not punish us for all our sins;
he does not deal harshly with us, as we deserve.
For his unfailing love toward those who fear him
is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth.
He has removed our sins as far from us
as the east is from the west.
The Lord is like a father to his children,
tender and compassionate to those who fear him.
For he knows how weak we are;
he remembers we are only dust.
Our days on earth are like grass;
like wildflowers, we bloom and die.
The wind blows, and we are gone—
as though we had never been here. Psalm 103: 8-16

Wholly Yours by the David Crowder Band

I am full of earth
You are heaven’s worth
I am stained with dirt, prone to depravity
You are everything that is bright and clean
The antonym of me
You are divinity
But a certain sign of grace is this
From a broken earth flowers come up
Pushing through the dirt

You are holy, holy, holy
All heaven cries “Holy, holy God”
You are holy, holy, holy
I wanna be holy like You are

You are everything that is bright and clean
And You’re covering me with Your majesty
And the truest sign of grace was this
From wounded hands redemption fell down
Liberating man

You are holy, holy, holy
All heaven cries “Holy, holy God”
You are holy, holy, holy
I want to be holy like You are

But the harder I try the more clearly can I feel
The depth of our fall and the weight of it all
And so this might could be the most impossible thing
Your grandness in me making me clean

Glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
You are holy, holy, holy
All heaven cries “Holy, holy God”
You are holy, holy, holy
I want to be holy, holy God

So here I am, all of me
Finally everything
Wholly, wholly, wholly
I am wholly, wholly, wholly
I am wholly, wholly, wholly Yours

I am wholly Yours

I am full of earth and dirt and You

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Blue Like Jazz pt 1

Hey guys, I'm reading a cool book called Blue Like Jazz - Nonreligious Thoughts On Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller. He really is able to put into words things I've thought or experienced as well as things I've never even though of in that way. I thought I would add some excerpts and talk a bit about them. Donald's stuff is in blue (aren't I clever).

I didn’t feel like I knew God, and yet He was making me experience this conviction (guilt over wrong done etc.) I felt that the least He could have done was to come down and introduce Himself and explain these feelings of conviction in person. If you don’t love somebody, it gets annoying when they tell you what to do or what to feel. When you love them you get pleasure form their pleasure, and it makes it easy to serve. I didn’t love God because I didn’t know Him. Still, I knew, because of my own feelings, there was something wrong with me, and I knew it wasn’t only me. I knew it was everybody. It was like a bacteria or a cancer or a trance. It wasn’t on the skin; it was in the soul. It showed up in loneliness, lust, anger, jealousy, and depression. It had people screwed up bad everywhere you went—at the store, at home, at church; it was ugly and deep. Lots of singers on the radio were singing about it, and cops had jobs because of it. It was as if we were broken, I thought, as if we were never supposed to feel these sticky emotions. It was as if we were cracked, couldn’t love right, couldn’t feel good things for very long without screwing it all up. We were like gasoline engines running on diesel.


It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in this system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn’t make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the President. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse.


The goofy thing about Christian faith...is that you believe it and don’t believe at the same time. It isn’t unlike having an imaginary friend. I believe in Jesus; I believe he is the Son of God, but every time I sit down to explain this to somebody I feel like a palm reader, like somebody who works at a circus or a kid who is always making things up or somebody at a Star Trek convention who hasn’t figured out the show isn’t real.

Yep, It's hard not to feel like a cult member when we talk about God and faith in general. Even though it is hard or uncomfortable, I believe it and care enough for you that I will look like a dork or a fanatic to share it with you. It's almost like having the cure for cancer or something. I would be evil and wrong if you had cancer to not try and share it with you. I believe Jesus to be the cure for life's problems.

The greatest trick of the devil...is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God.”

I recently heard a Pastor say that the devil doesn't want a Christian to be rebellious but wants us to be religious. The people Jesus had a problem with weren't the thief or the prostitute. It was with the religious people.

and a warm fuzzy poem by C.S. Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you
I never had a selfless thought since I was born
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through
I want GOD, you, all friends to merely serve my turn
Peace, reassurance, pleasure are the good I seek
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin
I talk of love, a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek
But self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

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Yep

You Have Redeemed My Soul

by Don Chaffer

You have redeemed my soul

From the pit of emptiness

You have redeemed my soul

From death

I was a hungry child
A dried up river
I was a burned out forest
And no one could do anything for me

But you put food in my body

Water in my dry bed

And to my blackened branches you brought the

Springtime rain of new life

And nothing is impossible for you

ViVi

Hello everyone, After we lost Meshach, Paige's friend with the puppies asked us if we wanted to take home a sister from the litter. We didn't really want a girl but decided to take her home and see how she "fit". She was cute and hadn't really bonded with anyone and whenever they tried to adopt her it fell through. Shadrach was a bit of a monster and likes to chew. He likes to chew on me as well. He's sweet but he snaps playfully at me and with his needle sharp baby teeth, he has drawn blood on me more than once. He has teeny nylabones and a plethora of things to chew on but I was his favorite. He could teach a course on cute so it is hard to get mad at him. So we brought the new Chihuahua home. She's almost all black and has a bit of white on her chest and one of her toes is merle like her brother. The friend called her Veronica. So we brought her home and expected that she would be smaller, meeker and you know just more girly. We thought he might thump her around. She is meeker and more girly but she sure doesn't put up with much of his junk. She can take care of herself. She endeared herself to me immediately and was very sweet. She also became his favorite "toy" and doesn't bite me as much. She is one of the best things to ever happen to him. She calms him down and sets him straight if he needs it, and he always needs it. So you may be wondering why I titled this ViVi. ViVi is Veronica shortened and "cutened" and she just looks like a ViVi. They all have nicknames. More later, m

p.s. if you click the pictures they will get bigger
we also have more new pics on WebShots

He's too young or Napoleonic to realize this might not be a good idea.

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