Life on Snow Hill

I mentioned in a post a little while back that the church we were attending had disbanded.  Becky and I have been visiting with a couple of churches for a while, seeking God’s will in where we ought to go.

This is sort of a funny story, but before we pulled out of the parking lot we knew that the Lord wasn’t leading us to the other church we were visiting.  We were pretty sure already, but we went one last time to be positive.  When I started up the truck to pull out of the parking lot, I heard a strange noise from where I thought was the fuel tank area (also where the fuel pump is).  As I drove down the road it started acting strange.  It finally died on me on dead man’s curve just outside of Harriman.  Maybe that was the Lord telling me, “See?  I already told you that wasn’t where you should go.”  Ok, that was a joke, but it’s funny how coincidental it was.  That fuel pump was going bad before then I believe, I just ignored the signs.

Anyway, back to the purpose of this post.  The Lord led us to Fellowship Baptist Church in Mossy Grove (near Wartburg).  We exclusively visited there for a few more weeks, wanting to be sure of God’s will and not do anything in haste.  Once we were sure, we met with the pastor and he talked to us for a little while about how the church operates, what they believe, etc.

He opened the doors to the church last Sunday, the 24th, and Becky and I went forward, along with my parents.  We gave our testimonies, and we were received into the church.

We’re thankful that God has given us direction, and He is already blessing us for following Him.

Hello again, loyal readers.  I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything in so long – the last date I put anything up was the 4th of August.  I don’t have much excuse for the rest of that week, but all of last week I’ve been gone on vacation.  This will be a long post, so hang on!

Becky and I went up to Ohio to see my sister and her husband, and then on to Michigan to see her grandparents.  On our way back south, we stopped back in Ohio to visit some more and then went to a Reds game.

When we first got to Ohio, it had already been a hard day at work.  I had to work on Saturday the 9th for maintenance – that’s a time when we can do work on servers that can’t be done during regular hours.  My job was simple that day – cable up the new storage to the SAN, and update the patches on our VMware hosts.  We ran into a small issue with the SAN, but it took us a while to fix it.  The VMware stuff went just fine.  But I didn’t get out of the office until about 2:00 in the afternoon, and it was too late to make it to Ohio for the main purpose of our trip in the first place.  My sister’s husband was being ordained as the assistant pastor at First Baptist Church in West Union, Ohio.  We made it to their house around 8:30 that evening I believe.  We went to church with them and several other family members on Sunday.  My sister’s father-in-law preached both services.  We all stayed with them again on Monday night, and went to the Creation Museum near Cincinnati the next morning.  I’ll blog about that trip in a different post since there is so much to tell.  After that, Becky and I headed straight up to Michigan.

Becky’s grandparents live in Lexington, MI.  It’s a small town right on Lake Huron.  This photo to the left is from the ‘Rock Wall’ that extends out into the lake in this small harbor.

We stayed with them for three nights and had a great time overall.  We were also able to visit with some of Becky’s other family members – cousins, aunts and uncles.

While we were there we also drove down to Port Huron to see the sights there.  Becky’s grandma (Oma) wanted so bad to take us ‘across the bridge’ into Canada.  I honestly hadn’t been crazy about the idea at all from the start, and then one of Becky’s aunts told us about how she was detained one day when her name/age/description was flagged as someone they were looking for.  That was enough for me – I didn’t want to spend any extra time with the authorities than I had to.  Going through customs was going to be bad enough for me – I hate subjecting myself to searches, etc.  Not that I have anything to hide, just that it violates my sense of privacy.  Anyway, we did go to the river and look across at Canada.  In the photo here, you can see two land masses – the one of the left is Canada, and the right is the good ole’ USA.

Lastly, on our way back home on Thursday, we stopped back by my sister’s house.  We got there around 8:30 again I believe.  They made home made chocolate ice cream for my birthday and we watched a movie.  Well, we tried anyway – we were all really tired.  We got up the next morning and headed to the Cincinnati area.  Our main intent was to go see the Reds play, but we did a little bit of shopping before game time.  At the game, we started out in the very top of the nosebleed section behind home plate.  I’m serious – when we looked behind us, we were looking at the outside of the stadium.  After a few innings, we headed down to the right field corner where they had a mostly empty ‘family’ section where alcohol wasn’t allowed.

The entire trip was a lot of fun, but there was a lot of driving involved so that was a bit tiresome.  We really enjoyed getting away, but we were glad to get back home at the same time.  Now it’s back to the daily grind of the job, and taking care of things around the house.

As most (if not all) of you know, there was some fairly heated discussion on a recent post I wrote about the Knoxville Church Shooting.  It made me think of this cartoon that I saw a while back, found again on this website (to give some credit – sadly I’m not sure where it came from originally).   –edit – Thanks to Hunter in the comments below, the image comes from http://xkcd.com/386/

In my younger days I used to debate, argue and all out fight sometimes over different things on the internet, whether it was on a blog, message board or other interactive communication platform.  As a lot of us know now, nothing productive ever comes of it.  Most people are there to simply argue, whether they actually believe what they’re saying or not.  I whole-heartedly believe there are a lot of people out there just to argue for the sake of arguing – nothing more.  They simply take the other side of an issue just for the fun of being controversial.

Sometimes this is a healthy thing – it can force people to fully think about things they’re saying, or to back up why they believe what they do.  Honestly that is one of the more helpful things I learned from never-ending flame-wars.  But again, for the most part (and this is the biggest lesson I learned) these things are just that – a never-ending flame-war.  Nobody wins, everybody loses.

I got sucked into it in the aforementioned post.  I didn’t intend for it to turn into an argument, but I sort of expected it to, if that makes sense.  In other words, I wasn’t going to let the possibility of it stop me from speaking my mind and saying what I believe.  But I guess that’s how they all start, huh?