Psalm 1

We ( the girls & Christine) are memorizing Psalm 1 together for school. I was reading through the Psalm again today and was amazed at how relevant it was to the current times.

Psalm 1
How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the path of sinners,
Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,
Which yields its fruit in its season
And its leaf does not wither;
And in whatever he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so,
But they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgement,
Nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
For the LORD knows the way of the righteous,
But the way of the wicked will perish.

Snow!

FYI: We no longer have Facebook Accounts

Interior Decoration Tip

Christine and I are going to have guests this Sunday after church and so we were talking about some of the cleaning we hoped to do. We began comparing notes on the various places about the house that we had noticed an accumulation of boogers on the walls. That's when the 8 year old boy in me came out and announced that it was "just poor man's stucco."
The 35 year old man in me, though, is about go fill up a bucket with hot water and pine-sol.

The Wife of My Youth

You know what the Bible says about the wife of your youth.

Well I love the wife of my youth, although neither of us are that young anymore. Today Christine turns 35 years old. She also turns 35 years sweet, 35 years wise, 35 years devoted to Christ, 35 years womanly, and 35 years lovely.

Be sure to wish Christine a happy birthday today.

Nerd Credentials

From time to time we feel it is necessary to re-establish my identity as a nerd among nerds. Toward that end I pose the following question:

Can you give me a word with the "dgm" letter combination in it?

I can only think of one.

- Joel

Carolyn Schwalbe for State Representative

Happy Birthday Ruthie!

Note: Ruthie is a graduate of Houghton, ignore the Cedarville shirt.

Quandary

I'm sitting here at the computer observing the snow falling out the window, debating about whether or not warn Christine as she stirs awake or let her discover the sad fact for herself.
It is pretty, though.

A Must Read Article

This article does more to answer my questions about many puzzling things than anything else I've read in the last couple of weeks.

My friends of failed convictions

I'm increasingly dismayed by the friends who've been swept up in Obama's cult of personality to the extent that they've become apologists for his position on abortion. Now, by all accounts, this is an unusually comfortable, enlightened and lofty sort of bandwagon, but I still fault my friends for hopping onto it.
As Princeton professor Robert P. George has cataloged in an astonishing essay for the Witherspoon Institute, no one more radically pro-abortion has ever served in the Senate or been nominated for president. Most of us, in a situation we consider to be ambiguous, would choose to err on the side of life. That is not Senator Obama's impulse. His support for abortion has bled into the area of infanticide (just to be on the unsafe side.)
No one who believes that a baby should be safe in her mother's womb has any business admiring Senator Obama, much less voting for him.
And yet there are those who claim to be pro-life and who do admire Senator Obama, and even defend his position energetically. They claim, with seeming earnestness, that an Obama administration would be indirectly better for the unborn and therefore more “pro-life.” This assertion is unforgivably absurd, like someone in the days before the rise of the Nationalist Socialist Party in Germany claiming that Hitler would be, indirectly, better for the Jews because he'd make the trains run on time. He did make their trains run on time, but just in the one direction.
This doubtless makes some of you wince, this seeming comparison. But I'm comparing the logic in the arguments of the respective supporters, not the political figures themselves. Senator Obama, the urbane committee man, is really nothing like Hitler, who was an active and violent persecutor of a race of people. Hitler was uniquely despicable: one of the few men in history to have personally initiated and implemented a holocaust. Barack Obama is only doing his best to perpetuate one.

Home Sweet Vermont

We are home.
Arrived at 10:08pm.
It took us 17 1/2 hours.
The kids were great!
We saw license plates that represented 44 of the 50 states. Cool!

On the road again

The van is packed.
The kids are sleeping.
Lots of memories to bring home with us.

Mini-Golf

The First Advent Christian Church of Augusta, GA

This is the youth building. It has a fireplace, fellowship hall, and kitchen. It is about the size of our fellowship hall minus the bathroom.

Sanctuary.
The kids in the baptismal.

Bethlehem Advent Christian Church

Riverbanks Zoo & Garden, SC

This is Obie looking at this . . .

We love Uncle John!

Hail to the Redskins!

Redskins 23

Philadelphia 17

In the Bible Belt

On Friday night, we attended a football game at Augusta Christian High School. It was a wild experience for us because the school was so big. We are not use to large private christian schools. The team had at least 50 players and there were 9 coaches on the sidelines and 4 more up in the box coaching through headphones. It was a great game and Augusta won which made it a fun game to watch.

Augusta AC Youth Group

Pastor John in action.
Obie singing hymns with the youth group.
The entire gang!

Newberry, South Carolina

On Saturday, we drove up to Newberry, SC to visit a friend from Houghton while John went to a wedding in Atlanta. In this picture we have: Katarina, Lucy, Grace, Natalie, Elisabeth.
These girls hit it off right away! They had a blast together at the Octoberfest in downtown Newberry.
This is my (Christine) friend Melissa and her son Gabriel. Melissa and I were RAs in East Hall together.
The Schnackenburgs: Jurgen, Katarina, Natalie, Melissa, Gabriel. We were truly blessed by our visit with them. They are great friends!

A Tour of Augusta

The Savannah River Park Walk




The Augusta Museum of History