“Will it be different now or the same? Have I changed at all?
And if you were to dive deep inside my soul
Would you find Jesus there or a gaping hole?
Should I be content with my beautiful “Christian” life?
But that won’t be enough for me
Not this year, not anytime soon
I have got to clean house
Gotta make my bed, gotta clear my head
It’s getting kinda stuffy in here
Smells sort of funky too
Like monkeys at the zoo
I have been whoring after things
Cause I wanna feel safe inside — that’s a big fat lie
No amount of green, gold or silver
Will ever take the place of the peace of God
Spirit come flush the lies out
Spirit come flush the lies out”
(from the song “Monkeys At The Zoo” by Charlie Peacock)
Yikes! I don’t have any links for this week! I think that this is the very first time that’s happened since I started posting a weekly list of links. I don’t know if the internet was really that boring this week, or if maybe I just frittered away less time chasing random blog postings than I usually do. :-) I’ll certainly try to have something cool to post for next week!
Now that my wife has publicly posted the news on her blog, I suppose it is safe for me to announce that Joy and I are expecting our second child. The new little one should arrive at the end of May or the beginning of June. Needless to say, we are thrilled and very much looking forward to the arrival of the new baby (I don’t know if I can say the same for Charis - I don’t think she has any idea what she is in for when she is no longer the center of attention!).
We don’t know yet if the new baby is a boy or a girl (we should maybe find out in January), but in either case we have already selected a gender-neutral name: Micaiah. It’s a Hebrew name that means “Who is like the Lord?”. Micaiah is from the same family of names from which we get the more common name Micah. You can read about Micaiah the prophet in the Bible in 1 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 18. We’re still working on a middle name, which will be different depending on whether the baby is a boy or a girl, so we’ll have to wait and see on that one.
“But Micaiah said, ‘As the LORD lives, what the LORD says to me, that I will speak.’”
1 Kings 22:14 (ESV)
Those of you who know me know that I’m a bit crazy (aka obsessive) when it comes to keeping things neat and tidy. That’s why I was very excited today when my new Dyson handheld cordless vacuum arrived today from Amazon. It’s a new vacuum that just came out and it’s designed to compete with dustbuster-type vacuums. Joy and I have had a Black & Decker dustbuster for several years now, and I frequently pull it out to vacuum up small messes. However, it’s not particularly powerful and I often have to pick up larger pieces of junk and kind of “feed” them into the vacuum. It works, but it can be a hassle. So when I saw that Dyson was releasing the new Root 6 handheld, I was super interested. I waited for a few online reviews to appear, and when they seemed very positive, I decided to go ahead and order one. So far I think it’s great. It has way more suction than our old dustbuster, and it’s really easy to empty out the stuff you’ve vacuumed, especially compared to the dustbuster. So now I can clean up our small messes quickly and simply.
“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)