Yesterday I had a meeting with a church in Lima, OH (my hometown – 40 minutes away) about some specifics for the website I am creating for them. It was over before lunch, so I decided to drop in and visit with my family (free lunches aren’t a bad bonus I guess). My grandma had a brain tumor removed this past month, but the doctors found out that cancer had made it to the brain. It was very hard on the family to get through the surgery, but my grandma seemed to be doing the best of anyone.

That’s why I stopped in yesterday. It’s so amazing to hear her speak of how she has been blessed by God with encouragement from so many friends and family members. Before the surgery she even took a stroll through the cemetary……..not in fear, but knowing that she was ready to go to heaven if God decided that. I sit back and watch her go through days and realize that I need to be so much more thankful for the life God’s allowed me to have. Death is uncertain, but I should use each day as an opportunity to let others know of God’s greatness. There’s nothing besides a faith in Christ that can allow you to stare death in the eyes and smile if that’s what happens!

AT&T might not have realized how much power was behind their motto quite a few years back. This world has done quite a bit to create an atmosphere where all we care about is what or who can service us or what we can attain. It’s even gotten to the point where today’s church is numb to reaching out to those in the community, but has no problem with doing all it can to service itself. I wonder what people would have thought of Christ if He spent all of His time with the 12 disciples that followed him most frequently.

Is it hard to see that many people would not have been impacted if He would have chosen to take those 12 men and spend His life only focused on them. What if those 12 men would have had a good amount of money, or maybe were businessmen that could hook Christ up with whatever He needed? Sometimes I wonder where people’s hearts are these days when they gather in churches across the world. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t go to church……it clearly illustrates that God created us to share in our fellowship and learning together (as the parts of a human body work together). There isn’t a shield that protects us from being selfish once we walk in the doors of a church. I think it could be that some simply get lost in the business of making a church look so good from the inside that they might forget what it looks like from the outside?

For two weeks I have actually been without a computer, so I’m starting to blog to get back into the swing of things! The hard drive on my laptop went bad so I sent it to Florida for data recovery. The guys at DTI Data were able to pull the information off of the drive and send it back on my external drive. Although it was pretty expensive, they were the best deal I could find and were able to recover every file for me.

Without the information I would have lost all of the websites I have created (unable to update them unless I re-created them) and 1,000′s of digital pictures of our family from the last 8-9 months. I couldn’t avoid the drive crashing, but I definitely could have backed all of that data up before hand (wouldn’t have had to pay to get it back). Life goes on I guess.

It’s amazing to go through something like this and realize that God will get you through it no matter what. Without that understanding I would have easily been angered or depressed about it all. Exciting things will be happening in the near future so stay tuned!