Seder tonight and Easter almost here.

Well, I was looking over my last post, I don't usually reread things (if I make a goof, I make a goof), but I got comments and a couple of e-mails and dang it was a downer! I didn't quite make it to suicidal, but it didn't seem far off. Well, blame it on the housecleaning. Dusting always depresses me ever since I saw that commercial with the magnified dust mites. Those things give me the creeps.

Well, I took Kathy to the doctor yesterday and he says that it is the arthritis in her knee aggravated by walking on the treadmill. A shot of cortisone and by yesterday evening she was walking much better. He told her to lay off the treadmill and go to water aerobics or something less impacting on her knees. So now I have to walk on the treadmill so it doesn't go to waste. It's either that or haul the thing upstairs to use it as a clothesrack, and I'm not carrying that sucker up the stairs! Thank you for all who were thinking and praying for her.

I had CADD class last night. Some times I think we make the poor instructor's head hurt. There are eight people in the class (started with twelve) including one girl that comes about every other time and a guy that has missed two classes for hockey games. We've been drawing widgets (small instruments or tools with lots of angles and surfaces that don't really do anything but make you draw them to scale) and it seems to be taking longer than the instructor thought it would. He keeps saying that next class period we're going to move on, but the next class period comes and we're back on our widgets. Personally, I'm getting a little tired of them, I've drawn three so far and since I just want to use it for landscape design, I don't need to worry a lot about angles and planes anyway. Well, sooner or later we'll get to something else and then I'll complain about that.

Tonight Kathy and I are going with Jim and Susan to Seder dinner at Our Lord's Community church. I haven't been to a Seder in years but it still amazes me the way God can use something as wonderful as a family meal to explain about the coming Christ. I would also say that it amazes me that the Israelites couldn't understand the parallels between Seder and Jesus, but since I have been so hard headed on my walk, I'm not going to jeer at anyone else. Some other friends of ours have semi-invited us to Seder at Council Road Baptist for Friday night but I don't know if we'll go to that or not. First of all, two Seders in one year seems a little strange, and a Baptist Seder seems even stranger. After all, I grew up in a church where the Youth Minister was asked to leave because he would have communion every time he had any of the kids over for a meal or party. Something about it would take away the specialness for us, after all, we don't want kids thinking that Jesus was a party animal, now do we? You have to remember that the Baptists are the ones who have been trying to convince people for years that the wine in Jesus' first miracle was really just grape juice. And that women aren't allowed to do anything in the church because of one verse of Paul's, of course, that goes out the window if they can't get anything done. And now most Baptist churches are allowing divorced me to be deacons because they can't get enough undivorced men to serve, if they can find any undivorced men at all. I thought I said I wasn't going to rag on anybody else's conceptions of the Bible, there goes another resolution.

After Seder comes Easter. This Sunday is Easter and we haven't decided where to go to church. I really hate going to Easter service when I don't have a home church. You never know what to expect and you can't really use that to decide if that is the right church for you because Easter is usually nothing like the regular services. Maybe we should try Emily's church, after all, any church where they can get the priest to climb on a donkey can't be all bad! In her blog Emily titled it "Other tasks as assigned." I think my dad could have related to that. It always amazed me that the church could come up with so many things that weren't in his job description that he had to do just so they'd get done. But I don't think I ever remember him riding a donkey on Palm Sunday, Leading one in the Christmas pageant, yes, but not riding it.

My goal when we do find a church (and it still depresses me on how long it takes) is to not teach a Sunday School class or serve on a council or committee for at least a year. I think the only way I can do that is to tell them they'll have to ask Kathy. Nah, she'll probably wimp out on me and say yes. I'll have to come up with another way. My friend Pastor Mark (Trinity International Baptist {the most un-Baptist Baptist church ever}) gave me a long list of stuff to think and pray about before we settled on a church. At the top of the list was find a church that isn't struggling financially. That lets out about all the inner city churches. Another friend of mine said not to choose a church socially. I agree that socialablity shouldn't be first on the list, but that is where I want to choose my friends from. After all, you become the people you hang out with (something I denied vehemently when I was young) so I want to hang out with holy, Godly people. Makes sense to me anyway.

By the way, for all you birders out there (if there are any) I have a couple of ID questions for you. As someone who can barely tell a cardinal from a blue jay, there are a couple of birds that have been hanging around my front yard. One is a little smaller than a jay and is mainly grayish-brown with white bars on his wings and two white bars from the base to the end of his tail, the other in very small, barely bigger than a hummingbird, that is gray with the most amazing reddish-pink throat and face, What the heck are these birds. Inquiring minds want to know. Speaking of hummers, for the last three years we have had the ugliest creature in the world sipping from our hardy hibiscus. It is cream colored with black bars all over. I swear the first time I saw it I thought it was a cottonwood borer! It was a little late last year and I actually missed it. But then it showed up and I couldn't believe I was waiting so anxiously for something so ugly. I am always amazed at God's creation, but never more so than in the Spring.

Take time to thank God for something today. If nothing else, He let you breathe.

God bless,

Wayne