I have the highest respect for the artists that paint.  I have a lot of respect for photographers, musicians, and writers as well, but there is something about a person who can take the beauty they see and use their hands, paint, and a brush, and put it on canvas.  Today I was looking at a robin with its bright orange belly.  It was playing in the green freshly mowed grass.  Behind that were a row of bare trees with their thick arms and skinny fingers reaching to the big bright blue sky.  The colors were bright and amazing and all I could think is, “I wish I could paint this.” Everyone has...

Yesterday, Catherine and I went out to eat at a restaurant after church.  Nothing special, one of those semi-casual eating joints that are not really fast food, but do not cost an arm and a leg either.  I went to the restroom and I am greeted by a 4 (or so) year old girl.  She was in there with her father and brother doing the restroom rounds.  The first thing I think is “Oh my, am I in the wrong restroom?”  There is a urinal in the corner so I know I am not.  Second, “How embarrassing it must be to have to take a girl into the men’s restroom.  I mean, I would never do that.”  So I...

January 15th of 2011 I married the girl that God had for me. I do not necessarily believe that every man has one woman that is for him, but I do believe that God has a plan and a destiny for every person, and it takes two people with plans that work together to reach the destiny that God has for us. My wife fits me perfectly. In the past year we have moved to Austin, received new jobs, bought a house, helped to start a church, and even became pregnant with twins. She has been beside me through all of this, and it all happened in the first year of marriage. She is patient, kind, long suffering, slow to...

For those that do not know, my wife Catherine and I are about to have twins. The thought of having children has made me think about certain things. One thing I have been thinking about often, is the people that are no longer here that I wish my kids could have met. There are many of them, but I have decided to blog about four of them that have passed through my mind a lot. I am considering this a memory blog so it may not have a lot of meat, but it is what I have had on my mind. I tried to find pics of them but they were hard to find online. I stole one of my grandfather from grandma’s facebook...

Last Sunday…September 18th,Revive Church officially had their first service.  We had 99 people and everything went smoothly.   Looking back, it is hard to believe how fast everything went.  I also put a little video of what the set up looked like a few minutes before we started the service. It looks really bad because I recorded it off of my phone, but it will give you an idea of what it looked like, check it out. One of the biggest things that God did was get us into McCallum High School.  The principal and the facilities manager did not really seem to want to mess with the hassle of having a...

In World War II, the United States refused to get involved for a long time.  The reason they did not get involved was that it did not affect them personally yet, so they saw no reason.  On December 7, 1941 all that changed.  On that morning, Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan, and the US could no longer stay out of the war.  In the Hollywood dramatizations, Isoroku Yamamoto (the Japanese commander) uses the line, “I am afraid that all we have done is wake up a sleeping giant.”  Although he probably never really said it, it is a great way to look at what is going in our world today…the giant...