place of nathan.

Bob Barr, former congressman, is running for president.
I give him 3:930 odds of winning the presidency over Hillary Clinton.

Check out his WordPress-powered blog to learn more about this Republican-turned-Libertarian.

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Every morning, I do a weigh-in. This means I know how much I weigh on any given day. I watch for trends–like, I typically put on a pound or two over the weekend, and I am normally at my lowest weight of the week on Friday morning.

By measuring my weight every morning, I am able to carefully analyze my weight and what makes me gain and what makes me loose weight. If I want to stop putting on a pound or two every weekend, I’m going to have to eat less over the weekend.

It is a really handy tool to take a daily measurement. Sometimes we may measure other things, too–like the amount of gas in the car or the cash in our checking account. Sometimes being able to measure comes in very handy!

Do you measure your spiritual journey? If so, how?

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Today (April 30), Emily and I celebrate our third wedding anniversary.
We are on vacation the rest of this week. Thursday we’re taking a day trip via Amtrak to Chicago. We are certainly looking forward to a wonderful vacation and time to relax and get away!
I love my wife a ton, and I’m so blessed to get to be married to her! I look forward to many, many more years with Emily.

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Today I came in to the office, and something fishy was going on with our network.

It intermittently just stopped working. Our database is all but unusable because the clients are crashing due to the network dropping.

The secretaries in the office started complaining that print jobs were taking a long time to print–what used to take 2 seconds to start printing now took 30-120 seconds to print.

My first thought was our network had somehow been compromised, so I opened up my sniffer to see where the extra volume of traffic was coming from.
But there wasn’t anything unusual there–there was not an exceedingly high volume of traffic.

So I started looking at our hardware, and I restarted all three network appliances we have (for good measure), and no change.

So finally, I unplugged literally everything from the switch, taking our network to its knees (even more than it was previously). I unplugged everything except 2 computers and the DHCP server.

This meant no one could do anything. I had to kill the network. Once it was all killed, the two computers were functioning back and forth together as normal.
Slowly, one by one, I plugged things back in. One at a time I tried and tested. It’s a long process, especially when you’re testing for an intermittent issue.

Isn’t this a lot like how God has to clean us up sometimes? He has to bring up to our knees before he can start to build us back up. But I think often, we don’t want to slowly test and we get our life back up to speed–we just want what we want when we want it.

Can you relate to this?

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I am really looking forward to this weekend.

Hopefully I’ll be able to relax and unwind whilst not doing much of anything. I would like to get some work done outside, including mow for the first time of the year, if it doesn’t rain too much.

I also have some landscaping to do, grass to seed and some further work to do on my compost pile (Todd would be so proud of me!).

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It’s been a while since I’ve given a weekend update, so I thought I would do so. (Plus I haven’t blogged in a while–it’s been a good break.)
This past weekend at New Hope, we had an attendance of 654, an 11% increase from the same weekend a year ago.
For the year (since January), our average attendance (592) is up 7.99% from the same 15-week period in 2007.

The numerical growth we’re seeing is exciting because we are seeing lives changed like never before!
All this growth, and we’ve even had a very hard, cold winter! God is faithful! We are thrilled to be an instrument He’s using to reach so many people!

Here’s a few stories of life change:
-A couple hit rock-bottom. They haven’t been inside a church building in about 20 years. In the past three months, they both have made decisions for Christ, and are faithful attenders! To God be the glory!
-A single guy was laid off and had nowhere to turn. He turned to New Hope about four months ago and soon after, made a decision to follow Jesus. God is good!

I look forward to celebrating more changed lives in the coming weeks and months!

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So far this week, I have had to restart my Windows computer (A higher-end 18-month old Dell machine) twice. Twice in two days. Twice in a 30-hour time span–and I haven’t even done anything intensive!
Every time (at least once a week) I have to restart due to performance issues, I make a wish:

I wish I had a Mac.

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Neo-Darwinists ask us to believe in things not seen. We’re not supposed to have an established religion in America, but we do, and it’s called Darwinism.
- Ben Stein

What do you think about Stein’s statement?

Read more: Expelled the movie is in theaters everywhere April 18.

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I’ve been staying busy today with a bunch of small things.

Small things really add up, you know?
A couple minutes here, a couple minutes there. It all adds up to a busy day.
Again, I haven’t touched any major projects–only small things today.

Sometimes I would almost rather be working on one large project, because I can become completely engrossed in the project, and time just flies by. When I’m doing small things, it seems time just creaks by.

But I think there’s some truth in that about our walk with Jesus, too. We might think it better to only do the big things right for God, but it’s all the small things that really matter.
Think about it–how many ‘Big’ things are there that really matter? Isn’t our relationship with Jesus based on all the small things?

What kind of small things are important? Are there big things, too?
What do you say?

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I don’t really ever get a bad case of Road Rage, but sometimes I do find people frustrating.

Take for instance, just yesterday late morning. I was driving to Auburn to get a cup of coffee, having my cruise control set at 56 (in a 55) and minding my own business. All of a sudden, a car pulled out in front of me.

I had about two seconds to decide what to do. Calmly, I turned on my turn signal, went out to pass, and came back into my own lane–all while going 56 miles per hour. I never touched the brakes, never touched the gas.
This idiot just pulled out in front of me and slowly accelerated.

The thing was, this guy pulled out from a church, and I found myself disgruntled against that church and its people because of the selfish actions of one member.

That really got me thinking…Our actions have a direct result to how people view our faith. YIKES!!!
If I found myself in a mild case of road rage with a fellow Christian, how much more would someone who was already anti-Christian? YIKES indeed.

This is just a friendly reminder to myself that in everything I do, I am representing Jesus to those who are watching me.

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This week’s Poll of the Week poses a formidable question–how will you answer the question: When will you put up your Christmas Tree?

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