My mom sent me this by email:
A disturbing trend has been observed in nature, illustrated below:
Animals that were formerly self-sufficient are now showing signs of belonging to the Democrat Party. They have apparently learned to just sit and wait for the government to step in and provide
She was smart, beautiful and funny, and most of all, she loved God.
February 11, 2007: Sunday morning I walked into Sunday School with the other Young Adults at Brainard Avenue Baptist Church. It was my second week back after being gone just over two years in California.
I had met the church and felt at home and accepted and appreciated back in 2003, and with that knew that I was to relocate at least for a while to Chicago after spending a few more years at home. After spending just over 2 years back in California, I returned to Chicago at the end of January 2007 and thanks to the generosity of friends church family in the area I was putting down roots.
Little did I know where those roots would grow and how my life was to change. Soon.
Back to that Sunday, February 11th. In my visits back to Chicago while living in California, I’d met some new members of the Sunday School class, students at Moody Bible Institute who were able to drive out to the suburbs for Sunday services at Brainard. It was good to see these people again in addition to the regulars and long-timers.
The Moody students had brought friends this Sunday. One young lady, in her first semester at Moody, had been searching for a church she could feel at home at while attending school, had taken advantage of her friend’s extra car seats, and was visiting the church for the first time.
The quiet, beautiful girl did not return for a few weeks.
When she did visit Brainard again, I made a point of talking with her for a few minutes. Making her feel welcome, I told myself.
It began as a friendship, nothing special. But I quickly moved beyond an average interest in her.
This was a Godly woman, beautiful, caring, very loving. All that attracted me very intensely. I had to get to know her better.
And so I did. Grace visited family in Washington for spring break. I missed her those weeks she did not come to Brainard.
I had offered to drive students to church from Moody when they needed extra seats, and one beautiful spring day they took me up on the offer. Three students needed a ride and so I went out early Sunday morning to pick them up. Due to the beautiful weather, the two others decided they were going to ride a motorcycle out to church that day, leaving Grace to ride with me by herself. She was not exactly comfortable with this situation at the outset, being alone in a car with some guy she hardly knew. But it was that or miss church, and I’d already driven out, so to not make a scene, she got in the car.
We began talking and found we had similar standards and backgrounds, and we both liked country music.
That afternoon several of us spent the afternoon at my apartment eating lunch, playing games, listening to music, relaxing. Grace and I continued to talk and get to know each other. I drove her back to school too, and said goodbye.
Over that spring the associate pastor and his wife invited several college students over for extended times of fun and fellowship, watching movies and entertaining their young boys. Grace was able to take some time off studying to attend one of these, so I volunteered to pick her up from school and bring her out to the suburbs so she could spend time with us.
The other Moody students had come out earlier in the day and so again I was able to spend time just with Grace, getting to know her better.
We also spent a Saturday helping some other students move to an apartment off campus. While there were others around, I sought out Grace and helped her and asked her to help me in specific tasks. I was twitterpated. And I believe she knew I was possibly interested in more than friendship.
Our friendship continued to grow and as the semester drew to a close I was trying to decide if I should ask her if we could move into a potentially romantic relationship or talk to her dad first. Various things led me to decide to speak with her dad first, but as I drove her and a mutual friend to the airport that morning in early May I bit my tongue.
Our parting was awkward as our relationship was possibly changing and yet neither of us had mentioned it to each other. We parted with an awkward side hug and I drove to work while she winged her way home to Dallas.
Earlier in the semester she had given me her cell phone number but had informed me her phone was broken and so I had not called her. As she left for the summer, she left a few boxes of things which would not fit in the summer storage at Moody which I was to take to the associate pastor’s house for storage. The boxes had her home address.
I spent the weekend visiting friends in Louisville, Kentucky and trying to work up the courage to call her or her dad. I still wasn’t very sure of her interest in me and I feared rejection. So I decided to try and talk with her one more time, just to gauge her possible interest.
Leaving Louisville late Sunday afternoon for the long drive back to Chicago, I called her. I’d used the address on her boxes to look up her home phone number in the phone book online. And now the phone was ringing.
Her mother answered.
“Can I speak with Grace, please? This is Matthew, a friend from Chicago.”
The phone call and the trip went quickly, all 4 hours of both. And I had my answer. We still had not talked specifically of our relationship, but I knew that if it was that easy for both of us to spend 4 hours talking and with similarities between us in standards and beliefs, I knew I wanted to pursue this lady.
The next day I called her dad. I spoke to him on Tuesday and asked if I could begin courting his daughter.
Over the next few weeks he asked me questions regarding my views and opinions on various matters and eventually told me he and his wife would allow me to court Grace.
I was planning a trip down to Missouri by then to see her for a weekend. She was working at Child Evangelism Fellowship’s headquarters outside St. Louis.
June 15th, 2007: The Friday before I drove down to see her, when we were having what by then was a regular evening phone call, I told her I’d been talking to her parents about courting her (she knew that already) and I asked her if she was willing to court me.
She said yes.
Over the summer she traveled to New York to work with children in the projects and other parts of the city, returning to Missouri and then Dallas in August, where I spent a week meeting her family and friends and having fun together.
We flew back to Chicago together: her to begin classes and me to get back to work.
Through the semester and now these months together I grew to appreciate more and more her strength, her tenacious love, her sense of direction and purpose, and her Godliness. Not to mention her beauty and her spirit, her consistency and organization. I knew rather quickly that she was definitely the one I wanted to marry.
Apparently she knew too.
After a winter trip to California meeting my family and friends and receiving further counsel from my parents, I began seriously considering marriage to this wonderful woman God had brought into my life.
After an intense period of counsel, thought, and prayer we were still unsure when the best time would be for our wedding to occur and our marriage to commence: Whether to marry this year or after she graduates in 2010.
Grace and I decided to have a period of time where we were to not contact each other but to spend that time seeking the Lord’s will and answers in our lives.
Ending Valentine’s Day, 2008, these 7 days were painful but rich, and we both, individually, felt God leading us to marry this year.
In the church parking lot, on February 25, 2008, 1 year and 2 weeks after we’d first met in the Sunday School classroom not too far away, I got down on one knee and asked Grace if she would marry me, be my wife and the mother of our children.
She said yes!
American Texan and I will be married August 2nd, 2008, in Dallas TX.
See our website at MattLovesGrace.com
…in my family it was me.
From ICanHasCheezburger
And some linky love:
And finally, this fine adaptation of Abbot and Costello’s famous “Who’s on first?”
This was too funny to pass up:
There’s some slight truth to it and I think the truth in it is not wrong or a failing of Americans. But overall it’s just funny.
Barb has an excellent post on bringing Motherhood to it’s deserved place of honor. And it’s funny too.
The Clerk was obviously a career woman, poised, efficient, and
possessed of a high sounding title like,
‘Official Interrogator’ or ‘Town Registrar.’‘What is your occupation?’ she probed.
What made me say it? I do not know.
The words simply popped out.
‘I’m a Research Associate in the field of
Child Development and Human Relations.’The clerk paused, ball-point pen frozen in midair and
looked up as though she had not heard right.
See twistedlogic’s take: Mothers are worth a lot more than they’re paid.
And, McCain winning in Florida is NOT good news.
Here’s a few funny bits that have got me thinking and kept me laughing in the last few days:
I was reading a list of Amazon’s top-ten best-selling books mentioned at Vox’s, and it gave me an idea for some fictional titles which would amuse me. And yes, I have too way much time on my hands.
It’s not difficult to make a woman happy.
A man only needs to be:
1. a friend
2. a companion
3. a lover
4. a brother
5. a father
6. a master
7. a chef
[...and the list goes on, and on, and on...]
In the race for the Republican nomination, there’s something for everyone.
There’s a liberal who’s principled and experienced but still liberal.
There’s a populist who tickles ears and yet is Christian, courageous, and popular.
There’s a fiscal conservative with serious experience and a very public track-record who wore a dress (once, on camera), supports homosexual marriage, and is not in favor of criminalizing mothers who have abortions (a slight but significant difference from actually being pro-choice).
There’s some dude with two first names and some good ideas, but with serious inconsistency, and serious stupidity concerning international affairs and national security harking back to pre-WWII Republican isolationism.
There’s a conservative business leader and governor with a funny first name and movie-star looks who’s been consistent, if not amazing.
And there’s a movie star without the looks who’s been amazing, if not consistent. If only he acted like he wanted to win.
There are others, but they are also-ran’s or sometimer’s and not worth consideration at this stage in the game.
I don’t much care for the liberal, the populist, the fiscal, or Mr. Two Names. Though I could stomach the fiscal, were he to, by some stretch of imagination, win the nomination. The others I abhor for various reasons.
The liberal is neither a man of honor nor a man of principle. He has convenient and far-sighted-sounding reasons for his liberal attachments and accomplishments, but his willingness to sell the farm, ideologically speaking, is not the measure of a man. Personally, I admire and honor his courage in his past. But I fear to many years within the beltway, and those who have spent those years with him not recommending him in the droves we’d expect, are very indicative of a lack of character and ability.
The populist is just that. He uses his sincere (and I do not doubt, genuine) Christianity to excuse and/or support and champion decidedly non-Christian policies. God did not institute a welfare state (for individuals or corporations) in Theocratic Israel. Instead He instituted laws and policies which protected individuals from each other’s harm and sin. Claiming that “green” science is correct in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary does not lead me to believe he is either “wise as a serpent” or “harmless as a dove”. In fact, I would submit the populist is the inverse: He is wise as a dove and harmless as a serpent (taken ironically, of course).
Mr. Two Name needs no rebuttal as he is his own best revealing mirror. Dismissed out of hand is the best response to the majority of his supporters.
I’d like the movie star to catch a fire, but his lack of consistency heretofore is troubling, and I believe, more accurately indicative of who he’d be in office that what he’d be if he did catch a fire.
The man I voted for in my last election (for some time at least) in California is the leader. A realization I came to after considering what he does when there’s not supposed to be a camera around.
Here are a few articles from across the web which seem to me to be particularly salient and and appropriate to the candidates in this race.
Thirty-four Republicans have endorsed Mr. Romney, while just 24 have endorsed Mr. McCain. Furthermore, Mr. Romney’s supporters are more in line with conservative opinion. Their average 2006 ACU rating was 84.1, and 26 of them come from states Bush won in 2004. Meanwhile, the average 2006 ACU rating for Mr. McCain’s supporters is 70.7, and just 12 of them come from Bush states. In light of Mr. McCain’s résumé, this is consequential. He should have locked up most members of the Republican caucus, but he has not.
…[T]here she was on “Meet the Press” Sunday, having to defend herself for simply saying that while King laid the groundwork (which she acknowledged), another part of the civil rights revolution was Lyndon B. Johnson’s masterful stewardship of the relevant legislation through Congress. She was arguing that she is more experienced in getting laws passed in Washington than is Barack Obama — which is true.
One seemingly consistent them running throughout Barack Obama’s career is his comfort with aligning himself with people who are anti-Israel advocates. This ease around Israel animus has taken various forms. As Obama has continued his political ascent, he has moved up the prestige scale in terms of his associates. Early on in his career he chose a church headed by a former Black Muslim who is a harsh anti-Israel advocate and who may be seen as tinged with anti-Semitism.
…[T]he political ups and downs of the candidates and the electricity of the campaign–”I am promising change!”–matter much less than the substantive policies the next president would implement regarding the five most important challenges facing our country.
Perusing my spam lists today I found one link from a Splog (spam blog) which kinda tickled my funny bone. This particular splog gives a “personal touch” by estimating or parsing the name of the original author, giving a few chosen adjectives of description and following with an excerpt from the scraped article (usually found by automated searching of RSS feeds) and a link to the original article.
To make it more personal, the splog tries to find a first name AND last name for the author, and while I have posted my last name down in the copyright bits in the page footer, the splog didn’t find that and had to guess.
I must say I’m honored to be considered a relation of Lynne and Dick:
Matthew Cheney wrote an interesting post today on
Here’s a quick excerpt
Copyright © 2007 matthew. Visit the original article at http://www.ipandora.net/2007/12/17/frank-ernest-me-blog/. Me Blog. Frank and Ernest, December 17th, 2007. ShareThis. Tags: blog, comic, Frank & Ernest, Humor.
Further humor (to me) comes from the new plugin I installed which inserts a copyright warning at the beginning of the feed version of the article. Because of this the feed scraper only got copyright boilerplate, tag, and plugin information.
Splogs foiled again!
Social conservative Christian leaders meetings are being trumpeted by the media. The talking heads crowing that the current crop of Republican presidential contenders are not conservative enough on certain issues and that movers and shakers such as Dr. James Dobson are planning on voting for a third party or not at all if the eventual chosen nominee of either of the two main parties does not support traditional family values such as opposing abortion and support marriage for one man and one woman exclusively.
I agree with these leaders that we desperately need strong leadership, morals and values in our President, without them we really do not have a chance as America. It has been rightly noted that the next President may very well nominate several more Justices to the Supreme Court, and with the current balance of ideology in the Court, the next Justices will direct the Court firmly in either direction.
Things we know for sure:
Hillary will appoint Ginsburg’s and similar justices. Men and women whose moral compass is screwed wrong. This is not a question or a chance, it is a known and acknowledged fact. She is not ashamed to say it. These Justices will direct the court towards the globalization of our legal authority, the affirming and legalization of abortion, the normalization of homosexual “marriage”, and the legal protection of terrorists and the aiders, abettors, and sympathizers, among other things. The Justices will practice judicial activism and will deny the will of the people and their elected representatives and the original intent of the constitution. They will hasten the destruction of America in immorality, wickedness, and the blood of our children.
The front runners of the Republican race, Guiliani and Romney, would appoint justices similar to Scalia and Thomas, who believe in the rule of law and the strong original intent of the Constitution. As such, the will of the people and their elected representatives when codified in law, is the law to them and they would not change it or define it into oblivion. They would deny the constitutionality of Roe V Wade, they would uphold the rights and protections of American citizens and the entire world by denying the supposed “rights” of enemy combatants and terrorists. They would uphold the will of the people in their laws and constitutional amendments protecting marriage between one man and one woman.
I have serious disagreements with the social ideas of Guiliani and qualms about the religious view of Romney, but when the option is Hillary, I will throw my whole weight of support behind them for our Country’s sake.
Of the two, I support Romney right now. He has changed his mind on social issues, but in the right direction.
So what of Thompson, McCain, and the others? Thompson has not done much since he announced his candidacy, wowing few and wooing fewer. He is not consistent in cutting spending or on social issues. I’d support him just as heartily if he were to be the nominee, but I will not support him in the primary. McCain is not good for America. His highest aim is his own preeminence and he can only be trusted to to what is expedient for himself. A selfish man is not a man to whom one gives authority.
Huckabee is trying too hard to be all thing to all people, the funny man, the cool man, the smart man, the right man. He is all things to all, and nothing true. This is sad. I had hoped he’d be a good man for the job, but he would be polling and focus-grouping as much as the last President from Arkansas. And with a name like Huckabee, how can he be elected?
As for Paul, to (mis)quote a bastion of English (French?) literature: “I fart in (his) general direction”. There is neither honor, honesty, nor leadership potential in that man. He tickles the ears of his listeners with good ideas mixed with bad. With false libertarianism and fake posture. His listeners and adherents are as enthusiastic as they are deluded and I pity them, and have little patience for them.
Do I wish there were a strong Christian man with history and depth, with values and strength? Yes. It is a sad commentary on the state of the lazy and bloated, idle Christianity which defines our Country that we do not have a strong man leading the way, an obvious and unimpeachable choice, a shoo in who no one can say wrong about because He is right and good.
We do not have such a man, and to search elsewhere for one is to run the risk of finding ourselves lost in history as those who forsook the good hoping to find the impossible.
Powered by WordPress | Theme: Aeros 2.0 by TheBuckmaker.com
