Happy Birthday Grandma

I miss you very much. 

Post Season Fantasy

Ok, with the Niners at 8-1 I can engage in some post-season day dreaming. My dream Niner playoff scenario :

1st Round: Niners over Cowboys
2nd Round/ NFC Championship: Niners over GB
SB: Niners over Pittsburgh

Niners banish playoff ghosts of the past by defeating The 'Boys and GB, and emerge as the winningest team in SB by defeating Pitssburgh.

Beating the Raiders in the SB would be a close second. :)

Fathers

I think the weight of a father's presence and discipline develops a weightiness and density of soul. I missed that growing up.

Weeds and Dreams

I have a childhood memory, perhaps apocryphal, of an instance when I was helping my grandma garden. I was probably four, and had been helping my grandma weed a flowerbed when she asked me to pull out a certain weed.  Now this 'weed' seemed to me to be a perfectly good plant. I didn't want to pull it. In my opinion, it was as legitimate a plant as any of the others she had in her bed.  I let her know that I thought this plant should stay, and in the process of reasserting that it had to go she let me know that weeds were simply plants that were out of place and whose presence choked out the growth of the desired plants.  It's the gardeners prerogative to determine what stays and what goes, she maintained, and he makes these decisions based on his desire to see certain plants flourish.

This morning it occurred to me that this is an analogy for life.  Our life is a flower bed.  God is the gardener, and we are his helper.   Our activities and dreams are the plants in the flowerbed. There are some things in our lives which we hold dear that God wants to remove because they will choke out what he's trying to cultivate.  Our job as his helper is to know his desire, watch him in action, and follow his lead as we assist him in his work.

(This analogy also helps clarify who's life it is to begin with - God's, not ours).

Jeff's Crotchety Comment of the Day

I realize how INCREDIBLY important and busy you are, dear sender of email, but unless we've been sending several emails back and forth in the span of a few minutes, please use an Opening containing my name and a Closing containing yours when corresponding via email. FB, Twitter, and text messaging are available for those messages that don't require complete sentences, but let's try to preserve some semblance of courtesy when we correspond with each other.

Two Questions:

1. Think this won't happen here?
2. If/when it does, would you refuse to receive government support that was funded by these means?

A Good Question

A friend from church posed the following question on his Facebook Wall:

If the love of God is unconditional, why is there a hell?

Here's my slightly abridged reply:

(...)

Regarding God's love, it's unconditional because it's not dependent on anything we do. We shouldn't confuse God's sovereignty in loving who he pleases with the quality of that love. What's more, there's no place in scripture where we're instructed to share a "negative gospel" - i.e. explicate to unbelievers that a set number of them will never be redeemed. The names on the roll of the redeemed is God's business, not ours. The following Spurgeon quote says it better than I can:
" I remember Rowland Hill’s reply, when somebody said that he ought to preach only to the elect. “Very well,” he said, “next Sunday morning, chalk them all on the back and when you have done that, I will preach to them.” But the chalking of them on the back is the difficulty—we cannot do that and, as we cannot do that, the best way is for us to leave our God to carry out the purposes of His distinguishing Grace in His own effectual way and not attempt to do what we certainly can never accomplish! There, scatter a handful of Seed “by the wayside.” Even if the birds of the air devour it, there is plenty more where that came from and it would be a pity for us to leave any portion unsown because we were miserly and stingy with our Master’s Seed!" - Charles Spurgeon Sermon# 2843, The Seed by the Wayside, Luke 8:5

A Thought On Social 'Security'

The problem with Social Security (SS) is the American people lack the will to fix the funding problem. As a result here's what will happen in the next 5-15 years: As the insolvency of SS becomes more and more obvious to even the most oblivious among us, political opportunists will step forward with 'solutions' which are paid for with our liberties. It's that simple.
The 75 year pattern of the exchanging of liberty for security will continue until we find a leader who can rally us to make the sacrifices necessary to preserve our freedom, including changing SS back to a disability insurance fund.

One can only hope this is a hoax

Yeah, but where will the equipment receiving the tax credit be manufactured?

Something tells me China's economy will get a bigger boost from this than ours will.