Blahblah Blog

Blahblah Blog.

So the reason I am doing this is because I hear if you have the word in the title and the first word in your blog and through out the blog then your blog will go up in the search engines. Blahblah Blog. Blahblah Blog. Blahblah Blog. Blahblah Blog. Blahblah Blog. Blahblah Blog. Blahblah Blog. Blahblah Blog.

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Blahblah Blog.

Heaven Crashing into Earth, or in other words, Storming the Gates of Hell.

God is:
Good
Joy
Life
Love
Light
Right
Justice
Creativity
Beauty
Energy
Excitement
....on and on, so on and so forth, maybe even “blah blah blah”...

If God is all of these things, and many many more, then what is the world we live in? As I see it there is not a whole lot of Justice or love or even creativity in the world most of the time. I know there are good things, but they tend to be few and far between.

This is a question I have been doing my best to work out in my life for a while now. I think the answer in many cases is that the world we live in is hell. This is a hard idea for me to grasp, and I’m still working on it so let me clear up what I mean.

I have discovered that I have this idea of hell that I know many people have. It is a picture, I do not know if I have seen it somewhere or what, but it’s engraved in my mind. In this picture hell is a place, I think it looks something like a cave, maybe even what the inside of a mountain looks like if you could get in somehow. It’s hot, not just an uncomfortable hot, but it is a hot that is completely unbearable and indescribable. There is some sort of lava goop dripping from the ceiling, and it doesn’t matter where you go it drips on your head burning your skin. The only light you can see is from the large river of the same lava goop running through the cave. As if this wasn’t bad enough, there is rap music blaring in the background playing so loud you can’t even think! No, I am just kidding about the rap music, but really I have this picture in my mind. Maybe there are some mean little demons running around poking you, taunting you, screaming and laughing in your face, and worst of all telling you what a fool you are for ending up in hell.

I think this picture is somewhat skewed. Now I don’t want you to think that I am saying hell isn’t bad, and by no means am I taking lightly the idea of hell. Also, I am not saying that there isn’t a place called hell, because there is. I am just beginning to think that it does not look much like that picture in my mind.

Over the past few months I have been rethinking my understanding of Hell. The only thing I know for sure about hell is this. Hell is the absents of God. This has monumental implications on how I live my life. Just take a look at the list of what God is, and try to imagine life without just one of them. The sad truth is that this is the reality for thousands of people everyday in our world. This is why I say the world in many cases is hell. What if, when a person who doesn’t love god dies he gets exactly what he wanted all along. He is left alone. Maybe this is hell. What if the picture of hell is a man sitting in a room all alone with piles of stuff he has worked so hard for his whole life. He is sitting there looking at the ground knowing that he missed the point of life. He begged God for years to Just. Leave. Him. Alone. He knows now that finely got exactly what he asked for. He just didn’t realize, the god is everything that is good, and now He is gone life is hell. I think this understanding of hell is far worse then little demons poking you.

In this redefining of hell I have had to rethink Heaven. If hell is the absents of God, then Heaven is the overwhelming presence of God. Now, I have been singing songs for years about streets of gold, a big big yard where I can play football, my crowns I get in heaven for doing good things and most exciting to me, a giant mansion! Now that is what I am talking about, I like big houses and lots of stuff! I mean who doesn’t right?

Once again, I am not trying to say anything bad about old hymns and audio adrenaline songs, I just think they may be distorted. In our pursuit of trying to explain things we simply cant, we have lost track of what heaven really is. I do not think anyone has ever said without a doubt that heaven has gold streets, I just feel that it is sometimes it is presented in a way that we look foreword to the stuff in heaven, and not the God. Heaven in my eyes is life the way God intended it to be. Complete intimacy with The One Who Created Everything. I think Korey told me one time that C.S. Lewis described heaven as being more Real then life here on earth, and I completely agree.

I want to see heaven crashing into earth so bad. I want to storm the gates of hell, because as Rob Bell put it, “God is in the liberation business.” As I have started rediscovering what my life is about, and figuring out what God wants me to do, I am beginning to wonder if all God really wants us to do is bring a little slice of heaven here on earth. These are all just thoughts of mine, and they may be right and may be wrong. All I know is that we have to keep discovering what God is all about.

Writer's Cramp

So I wrote this down a while ago but since we just started this blog I'll put it up now.



Written 8/9/07



So I went to Ruidoso this weekend. i love it up there. The trees and the mountains are so great. It's so much more natural than anything in Albuquerque and yet it is still not quite the same way God originally created it. There are highways and civic centers and gas stations that dot the landscape too. I've never been anywhere not touched or altered in some way by man. I think our sinful nature shows through in the things we create. They may seem great when we first get them or make them, a new ipod, a cool car, a CD, but they lose their excitement very easily. God's creations on the other hand are new every morning, continually renewed, like mountains covered in pine trees, or the tide coming in as the sun sets over the water, or a relationship, or a good laugh. God is so much more creative than us, and it shows.

so I stopped there cause my hand got tired of writing it in my notebook. There is much more that can be said about this, however, now my hands are tired of typing.

Am I sleeping on a volcano?

I came home Saturday afternoon and I turned on the TV. As I sat down I found myself watching the History Channel. The show that was on was called something along the lines of “MEGA DISASTERS”. I have seen this show before and all of the shows I have seen consist of inventions, ideas or machines that have gone terribly wrong. For example I recently saw an episode on the Hindenburg Air Ship, it explored the reasons why it burst into flames killing hundreds of people, who was to blame, why they thought that filling a giant balloon with flammable gas was a good idea... I think you can see how this show is not the most uplifting thing on television, but for some reason I still find myself watching it. So I curled up by the fire and started watching this show about peoples past failures. The “MEGA DISASTER” of the day was Mount Vesuvius. Which is odd because I thought the show was about man made stuff that went wrong, but I guess I was wrong. The narrator led me though the history of Mount Vesuvius and its many eruptions. I am guessing that most of you know about this place in Italy, but I didn’t know that much about it so here are some facts to bring you up to speed. Mount Vesuvius is the largest volcano in Italy, in fact it is one of only three in the area. It is located just east of Naples, Italy which is the capital and is home to over 3 million people. All of this is very interesting, but it really does not have much to do with why I am writting this blog. The real reason why I am writing this is something that the guest volcanologist said about Vesuvius’s last eruption. This eruption happened in 1944 and destroyed 4 villages surrounding Naples killing hundreds of people. He said that it had gone over 50 years without a big eruption, which means several generations had past. He was saying that whenever two or more generations pass without an eruption people start to get a “false sense of security”. Over the 50 years trees had grown over the top of the volcano, and people had forgotten how devastating it really was. They had even begun to grow fond of the beautiful cliffs that over looked the area.

A False Sense of Security.

When I was watching this I started to think, maybe this has happened to me. Maybe I am sleeping on a volcano. What would I do if I lost everything that I had, money, friends, loved ones... I should hate money and love God. I should love my friends and family, but love God more. I have grown very fond of all my stuff, not that stuff is wrong, but sometimes I wonder if I have forgotten what is important in life. God should be more then enough, and that is my prayer today, and forever.

I have plenty more to say on this subject, but this has gotten really long so I’m going to stop for now.

Paper Nazi's

The people that work in the computer lab at CNM are crazy!!!! They care so much about about waisting paper, "because it costs the school so much money in waisted paper" they say. So what did they do about it? They bought a program, so now you have to have a user name and a password to print. This program is pretty handy because you can set the number of pages any given person can print to say, 15 pages, but the program cost like $10,000 or something. Paper costs .7 cents a sheet not even a penny. You would have to print 1,428,571 pages of paper to add up to $10,000. Who is the one waisting money now!!!!!

what are we doing

Hey guys,,
I just heard this quote on T.V. on Run's House none the less (hee hee) and wanted to share it and challange all of us.

It was something that tennis player Arthur Ashe lived by ( Do u know who he is?)

START WHERE YOU ARE---USE WHAT YOU HAVE---DO WHAT YOU CAN

That motto does not leave you a whole lot of room to do nothing.

mike and i and the boys try to do something every Christmas for someone, we might and might not know them.

I have a family in mind this year that I would like our family to get involved and give of some of our Christmas budget towards. Anyone interested in joining in??

Hey Korey and Jesse maybe you could present it to the college group?

Any way my words of wisdom today.

Love ya'll

Lawrie

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