A Quick Thank You, and a Prayer Request

I've been thinking about the last nine months I've been blogging, and how it has been so beneficial to my soul in many ways. The main reason being the way you guys have encouraged, exhorted and even once or twice corrected me. I thank God for you, it's been a blessing having you pray for me when I ask, and taking the time to spur me on to good works.

Now I'd like to ask you to pray for me and my family, my dad is about to leave for Iraq for a job he got there. He'll be gone for about a year, maybe getting to visit us once. I realize this is going to be hard, and I am asking God to help us through this time.
I regret I cannot give any further info on what my dad will be doing there for his job.

Merry Christmas!
-cj

Tagged: Six Things I Have Learned This Year

I've been tagged by Penn Tomossatti from the blog "All of Grace," to tell you six things I've learned this year(outside of school). Well, here they are!


1. The art of fence building, I've been building a lot of fence in the past few months.

2. How to use a number of different saws(skill saw, chain saw, etc.)

3. I have learned so much of God's love and greatness.

4. Some HTML and a little CSS code.

5. Over the past year my dad has been looking for a job, and with such a bad economy, I've had to do without a few things. So I guess what I have learned from that is to be content with very little(my dad has a pretty good job now, and were going to need a lot of prayer, I'll explain that in a later post).

6. Lately I've gotten very interested in politics, so I've learned a lot about that too.

I won't be tagging anyone but if you would like to do this, you are completely welcome:)

-cj

"Jesus Freaks" by dc Talk and the Voice of the Martyrs

It is said that there are more Christian Martyrs today than in any other time period. This book is a collection of amazing stories of people who risked their comfort, their family, their friends and even their lives for the Gospel and Jesus Christ. It tells only a few of their stories that must be told. It is a must read, I highly recommend it.

"Do Hard Things" Conference

Tomorrow, we(some of my family and I)will be leaving to go to the "Do Hard Things" conference in Colorado. If you already know we live in Texas, then your probably wondering why we don't just go to the Dallas conference. Well, we're also going to see our friends who live up there(we knew each other when we lived in California). We haven't seen each other in a long time, so we will be staying there a few extra days.

Please pray that we have a safe flight there and back.

Due to our leaving, I will not be able to post until Monday.

-cj

brothers and sisters

I love my brothers and sisters, and to our society that's weird, because in a normal American family kids think younger siblings are annoying and older siblings are bossy. So I'm reading this great book 'Making brothers and sisters best friends' by Sarah, Stephen,and Grace Mally http://www.brothersandsisters.net/, it's really helping me to view my siblings as friends that I can establish great relations with. If you see them as the last person you'd want to hang out with you have the wrong perspective. Your brothers and/or sisters should be the people you're pursuing friendship with the most, after all they are the ones you're going to know the rest of your life anyway. As adults relationships with our siblings will be a lot easier if we work on being our brothers and/or sisters best friend. Besides you may have to deal with all their faults, but they have to deal with yours too.