Just thought I would bring you up to speed on the new blog home – GregsHead.net.

NEW BLOG FEATURES

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• A much better, easier domain name (GregsHead.net) complete with new e-mail! (click here to e-mail me!)
  

• A nifty picture of my head! (Well, Jen doesn’t think so…) 🙂

Stay tuned for more amazing features!

🙂

It’s time!

Henceforth, this blog shall be located at:

GregsHead.net

Wow! What a couple of days it has been! We have gotten between 18 and 24 inches of snow (by my unofficial count) and it’s still blowing around out there! (The snow has stopped, but it keeps shifting places!)

We were scheduled to sing at Crosswinds this weekend, but got the call around 2:30 or so on Saturday that the service was canceled for that night, and we’d see about Sunday. Well, we pretty much knew (at least by looking out our window) that Sunday was not looking like a very strong possibility!

Even still, I wanted to be ready, so, while the snow was still coming down, I went out and shoveled two tracks in our driveway, and knocked all the snow off of the van. The snow was light and powdery and about 14 inches deep at that time — and STILL coming down! Fast! But, I figured at least I’d have a head start on it.

So, set the alarm for 5:30, because to get to Crosswinds by 7:00 (to prepare for a 7:30 sound check) I’d have to leave at around 6:00… AM!!! Well, I somehow managed to turn the alarm off at 5:30 and woke up on my own at 6:36!!! ARGH!!!

I hurried downstairs to check on the snow… STILL SNOWING!!!!! OH MY!!!! There was probably another 6-8 inches of snow since I had shoveled… but the problem was the drifting. My tracks in the driveway were covered over, so there was a good 12-15 inches of snow to dig through… or more!

I called the church (since I had not yet received a call) and was just going to let them know if we were still going to try I was going to be VERY late! 🙂 IT WAS STILL SNOWING!!!!

Well, the services were canceled. So, that put the early morning phone tree in motion (very sorry to any of you I had to call at 6:45am… I hope to NEVER have to do that again…) 🙂 And, finally, around 7am, we got to go back to sleep.

Until Kirsten woke up. 🙂

We have a fun slideshow of our winter wonderland for you. Click the photo below for the slideshow (a Quicktime Movie).

I just turned it off. Toward the end of the fourth quarter of the Atlanta/Philadelphia game… I just turned it off.

So far, only one out of 11 teams have won the 10 playoff games played. (Yes, I really wish it were possible for BOTH Pittsburgh AND New England to lose the game this afternoon badly!) 🙂

I just find it hard to root for teams full of arrogant players. Mouthy players. And, easy to root against them. The Steelers are the only team left to root for (sorry, Pittsburgh…) as they are not mouthy, they are just this year’s media favorite (like the St. Louis Rams of a few years ago) that I almost automatically have to root against… can’t go with the crowd, ya know…

One out of 11… that’s not good. Makes for a slightly frustrating playoffs.

If only the Bills had won that last game……..

Coming soon, to a browser near you… a neater, cleaner, funner URL for this blog:

gregshead.net

I have heard in recent days on various news programs many people saying, “I just want to see justice served. I just want justice.” In fact, just today I heard a radio clip of a clearly emotional woman who spoke of a priest charged with some kind of sexual abuse… in 1980… and she said, “I just want to see justice happen.”

Wow. 25 years later. They are trying this guy, and he may receive some sort of punishment for his crime. Which, technically is justice. I think.

People say all the time they just want justice. They do not!

“The one among you who has never done any wrong thing may throw the first stone at her.”

Justice is a nice idea, but if we were actually held to true justice… we would all be dead. Executed for our crimes. Not the big noticeable ones like sexually molesting young children or murder, or theft, or … you name it. But anything that goes against loving God with our entire being and loving everyone else as – or even more than – ourselves.

All of us are in the same boat. Flawed. Messed up. Guilty. We need to stop thinking justice is when someone gets locked in jail for a crime allegedly committed 25 years ago and concentrate on living freely in God’s love and loving everyone around us. Perhaps then there will be “justice”.

I kinda sound like a hippie…

What a bummer! My Bills are out of the playoff picture (AGAIN) so I was trying (even though I don’t really care) to find another team to root for…

The first weekend, I thought I would root for Seattle, since we have friends there, like the city, and they were a long shot. I like long shots.

The shot was too long…

Was also rooting for San Diego and Green Bay. SD is a cool story… well… WAS a cool story. And, how can you not like B. Favre?

BUT… no dice. 3 out of 4 teams I was rooting for lost last weekend. Crazy.

OK, no worries. I can jump on another band wagon! 🙂 This weekend I was thinking it would be so cool if St. Louis went into Atlanta… an 8-8 team beating Michael Vick at home… could be fun… and those Steelers are so totally over-rated, an early loss to, yes, even the J-E-T-S, Jets! Jets! Jets! … would be fun. And I really do not like Philly at all, team/coach attitude, just not fun to root for, so I root heavily against. 🙂 Besides, I used to be a big Minnesota fan in high school, so it was easy to root for them! 🙂

But most of all… I will NEVER root for New England. They ooze arrogance and smugness that just makes you want them to lose. (Well, me anyway) Plus, they are division rivals who seem to have quite the upperhand on our Bills of late… so… it’s ALWAYS fun to see them lose!

Well…

1-7 so far this playoffs. Indy beat Denver. That’s the only one I got right. 🙂

So this weekend? Who do I like? (so you can go but down a “sure thing” in Vegas?) 🙂

I am quite against my better judgment rooting for/picking:

And for the Super Bowl, I would love to see Atlanta finally win one! They are the only team left I can actually root for instead of against. So… here’s hopin’…

(You should probably go place your bets now…) 🙂

While talking with a friend tonight, I think I realized anew a trait of humanity that does not really mirror our Father. It is not on the surface a bad thing, quite the opposite. But I always wonder when our ways are very clearly not His… perhaps we should take a look at our “ways”?

We really want to fix stuff. When things go wrong in our lives, or the lives of our brothers and sisters or others who are close to us, we want to do anything we can to help. And why not? Love your neighbor as yourself, right? Don’t we try and do everything we can to fix our lives when something goes wrong?

Perhaps there is the first mistake.

Life is so much about trust, and most often our first response to adversity is not to stop and listen to what God would have us do, but to roll up our sleeves and tackle this issue head on. Sometimes the blow is too devastating for an immediate response, so then we just reel back and lose any sense of forward direction. Again, not trusting our Father to be with us, and take us foward – to go with us there.

When someone we know is in trouble, even by their own choice, the response is quite similar. We want to take matters into our own hands and help them get back on the right track. Offer advice, help straighten out bad thinking, admonish them… and all with an urgency brought about by the discomfort we have with suffering.

I am not saying that I am immune from this. I know I do this very thing. It is hard to watch someone whom I love be beaten down by life, or worse yet, by their own persitently bad choices.

But God does. God allows us so much more room than any of us give to each other. The Father let his wild son have his full inheritance, knowing full well that his son would get hurt. His son, whom he later runs to meet, who receives the largest welcome-home party imaginable…

And he let him go.

That is crazy love. That is so crazy, I think I get it, and it STILL doesn’t make sense. It is so hard to let someone suffer. To not step in and fix stuff. But God does not always fix stuff. Sometimes the greater good, the greater freedom and joy can come from the lower depths of our bad choices.

The ultimate freedom was in the son returning to his father after he had finally hit the bottom. That can not have been easy for the Father. He loved his son. But the greatest good is not always in the immediate fix. Sometimes loving someone really means letting them fail.

So, do we allow our brothers and sisters to wallow in sin? To completely destroy their lives? No. If a brother is in sin… restore him gently. We ought to encourage each other to live in the light, since we are new creations – the old has gone the new has come. But once we encourage, once we admonish, once we have lovingly confronted someone in a behavior or mindset that will hurt them or others… we must allow them to choose. We can not make their choices for them, even if we try. God does not miss anyone’s poor choices. He knows all things. Nor does he want for anyone to suffer eternal condemnation due to poor choices. Nor, does he always step in and fix stuff.

The greatest love allows the greatest freedom. True freedom produces the greatest love.

As hard as it may be, sometimes we just have to let them go.

I was thinking this morning about death. Not sure why. Actually, I think I was thinking about the future for some reason… when I would be in my 50s, 60s, even 70s. And all of the interesting parts of life that might inhabit that season of life.

And then I just realized… there’s no guarantee of that. There’s no guarantee that I will be around here then, or Jen, or any of us, for that matter. Who knows when death will settle on me or the people I most love?

That might be a sour way to start the day… but it wasn’t for me. It just reminded me that life is today. The Kingdom of God is near. Life can be experienced to the fullest when we are not hindered by our past, or concerned for our future… but when we just live now to its fullest. As a chosen child of God. Today.

We watched an episode of Quantum Leap last night with an old Indian guy who just wanted to get back to the reservation to die. His grand-daughter had him in a nursing home to prolong his life, and he just wanted to die in freedom, instead of preserve this life.

I thought that was pretty cool. When this life is all we have, we hang on to it with all our strength… because it’s all we have. But when we have the promise of more, as we do in Jesus… we can not only have hope for “life everlasting” but we can really live life today!

Day to day brings joys and challenges, and even devastating heartaches. But the hope of tomorrow gives life today. Death has no hold on us. No power.

So live it up! 🙂

(editor’s note: In light of the previous post, this post may seem somewhat insincere… but that dichotomy is perhaps part of the following “noise”…)

I love Chris Tomlin’s music! It’s great! We have been doing How Great Is Our God for a while now, and a friend recommended his song Unfailing Love, so I am sure we’ll do that one sometime soon. I even e-mailed him today to tell him how much we like (and use) his stuff! Great worship music!

He has a song called The Noise We Make. An album named after the song. And he means the noise of our voices lifted in adoration of our Father.

But a different noise just came to my mind.

For a little while now, perhaps since Christmas, perhaps longer, I have been a bit troubled by the “noise” in my life. Especially in my house.

Some of it is the noise of our messy-ness, caused by too much stuff, played with by too many tiny kids in too many small rooms. 🙂 You can’t really help that.

Some of it is the noise of all of our toys. We have 9 computers in this house. Three are always on, and two more are on for good portions of the day with little boys playing fun educational games in front of them. That’s a lot of computers. Sometimes, that’s a lot of noise.

Some of the noise comes from the half dozen or so “noise makers” in our house. Our main stereo with the iPod, or the portable speakers that can be anywhere in the house. My main computer can be playing iTunes all of the time, while streaming the entire music library to the other wireless computers in the house that can be simultaneously playing entirely different music. That can be a lot of noise.

Some of it comes from the many vintage video game systems I have collected over the past several years. TI-99/4a, the computer from my childhood, over 20 years old. (Closer to 25!) With a collection of some 50 games, and books to program more into it. Add the Nintendo NES system (a CLASSIC game system!!) with 2 dozen more games and a Sega Genesis with a dozen more…. and you have more noise than you can ever actually make…

(I think that made sense…) 🙂

Add on top of that phones on every floor, digital cable TV with a DVR to record and play anything any time you want (you can record TWO things AT ONCE all WHILE WATCHING something else already recorded!?!?!?), a possible 5 TVs with 5 DVD players (including our computers). Add to that about 100 board games and/or card games…

We can make a lot of noise.

And it’s fun! It’s great! I love ALL of that stuff!

But tonight, after all the noise was quiet… I was talking with God, and really wanted to hear from him, and all I could think of was all of the noise we make. All of the stuff that (probably) drowns him out every day.

Relationships only grow through shared life. You can’t expect a friendship to grow stronger if you never hang out. You can’t expect a spouse to grow closer, or invite you in closer, without devoting time and attention to them, and just being interested in them. You won’t win your children’s hearts, you won’t have the influence you want in their lives, if you don’t learn to turn off the noise and singularly focus on them.

We can not hear God over all the noise we make. We can sometimes see bits of him in it. Perhaps gain some knowledge of his past dealings with men, or his Truth revealed to them. But I think we miss him, and likewise, he misses us.

My heart is longing for my Father right now. And I think that’s good. I miss him. I love all the things we have been blessed with. We really do enjoy them together as a family. But ultimately, they are just stuff.

YES, even my apple computers!

(I can’t believe I just said that!!) 🙂

I think it’s getting noisy in here, and it might just be time for the noise to take a break. I want to hear my Father speak to me. I want to know his voice. I want to let my wife and my kids know how special they are through my undivided attention to them. I want to love my friends by just being available.

And I really, truly hope that I am not just making a lot of noise.