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A few months ago Reese started to call me Niles. Not just every once in a while, but that is all she called me.

She knows that her mom’s name is Lindsay, but she doesn’t call her by her name. Only me.

The other day I asked her not to call me Niles anymore. She just looked at me and said, “Ok Pastor Niles.”

This is my favorite time of year.

I love it when it starts getting a little cold outside, the sky get’s a little grey, and I will admit it, I often look at the sky hoping for a little snow. (Though this never happens because I live in Texas)

The main reason that I love this time of year is that it is the holiday season, and my very favorite holiday is coming up.

What’s that?

What is my favorite holiday you ask?

Well, it was once a well known holiday that everyone in our country celebrated.

Let me give you some hints.

Turkey, Pilgrims, Indians, The Mayflower. Any idea?

I’ll just tell you: Thanksgiving.

Remember that holiday? We use to get together with our families, eat a big meal and go around the table telling everyone what we were most thanksful for this year.

Well we used to to that, before Halloween and Christmas got together one night and decided that there was not enough winter for all the holidays to share. So what did they do?

Halloween and Christmas got together with the local business owners and decided to squeeze out Thanksgiving.

“Yeah”, they told Thanksgiving, “We’ll still give you the day, but don’t expect anyone to know about it”.

And in a brilliant PR move Thanksgiving was regulated down from a first class national holiday to the one last thing getting between consumers and “Black Friday”.

I love Thanksgiving.

I love getting together with my family. I love waking up early Thursday morning and smelling the turkey cooking in my Mom’s oven, I love sitting in the living room all morning long eating cinamon rolls and watching the Macy’s Thankgiving Day Parade. I even like sitting, waiting to see Santa end the Parade.

The other day, Nov. 8th, I pulled up to a local Hobby store and not only could I see the sparkle of Christmas lights on the trees and the soft rolling fake snow on the ground of the stores window display, I could also here the sound of the bell. The bell of the Salvation Army worker standing out front, collecting donations, in her unmistakable red bucket.

As I stood in that parking lot, staring at the Christmas scene before me. Holding my latte from Starbucks, served to me in that festive red Christmas cup. Listening to the carols beaming through the parking lot speaking, playing songs like “Oh Holy Night” and “Jingle Bells” I have to admit something….

I have never wanted to kick over a Salvation Army bucket more in my life!

Thanksgiving, I will never forget you!

I came in this morning after a long night of election watching and Thereflu taking to quite a disturbing scenario.

I guess we have been having some rodent problems in the office, so they put out traps all over the building to try and get rid of the rats.

The kind of traps they set out though are those “humane” kind that don’t kill the rats, they just trap them on this paper covered in glue.

Now to say that these traps don’t kill the rats is wrong. The traps might not kill the rats, they just stick to them waiting for someone to come in with the courage to put the rats out of there misery.

So far this morning we have caught 3 rats.

Below are some pictures of the last one we caught.

It was huge.

It was disgusting.

And it refused to go quietly.

Cancer has touched my life about 5 times. Not me directly, but people close to me, people that I would consider not just friends but family. Just this last week we found out that it has happened again.

Pastor Robert and Karyn Barriger from Lima Peru, just found out that Karyn has an aggressive form of breast cancer. The doctors are very hopeful, in fact Karyn’s doctor (who happens to be the Surgeon General of Peru) has said that he thinks they can get rid of the cancer with aggressive treatment. We are really standing with Robert and Karyn, believing that not only will this cancer go away, but that this will make a huge impact on the country of Peru, as they witness God’s power in Karyn’s treatment and healing.

This news has reminded me of something that I dealt with earlier this year, and am still dealing with. A few years ago I had a friend, a very close friend, that was diagnosed with cancer. He has literally been fighting for his life for years. In the process, this friend has lost his faith in God. That has been very hard for me since he was very influential in my life as far as my relationship with God. Last year, another friend of mines wife was suddenly diagnosed with cancer.

The difference between this friend is that he and his wife are pastors of a very successful church. My friend who lost his faith is still fighting for his life. My other friend, the pastor, lost his wife earlier this year.

What really bothered me about this was not just the fact that these are my friends, but how biased I became in my prayer for them. For my friend the pastor, I went into real spiritual warfare. I fasted, I prayed, I wept, I declared healing over her body. For my friend who has lost his faith, without realising, I began to pray for his return to Christ. I prayed that he would realise his error and repent. Praying for his healing became an after thought, a prayer I would quickly say at the end of my prayer time.

When my friend the pastor lost his wife I was sad. It was hard for me to understand how this could happen with everyone who was praying. But when I stepped back, and listened to God. I was no longer just sad. I was also broken.

Jesus never showed bias toward those he touched and healed. In fact he told us not to be very care full about showing favor to one person or another. Just because one of my friends lost his faith and one was a pastor, it does not change the power of God. In fact if you study the people that Jesus healed, most of them were healed before they believed.

Isaiah 59:1 says : “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, That it cannot save; Nor His ear heavy, That it cannot hear.”

There is nothing that we can do to limit the power of God. God is God no matter what we think or do. But we can limit the power of God in our lives, and that starts in our thinking.

In my mind, I gave God only so much power. I thought, if He is going to heal someone, it is probably going to be the pastors wife, not my friend who lost his faith. I think for me, this issue and many others that we might think, talk or argue about really can be boiled down to one question: I either believe God and his word or not. He is either ALL powerful, or not at all.

Hopefully in the future, when I am faced with a choice between what I think God can or can’t do or who he can or cannot touch, I will remember this.

Please pray for Robert and Karyn Barriger, their family and their church.

Also pray for my other friend, that he would be healed.

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

I had an interesting conversation this morning over coffee. There is really no need to give you the details, but the subject was on “The Prosperity Gospel”. The main question that came up over and over again was “Does God want you Rich?”
My short working answer was I don’t think God cares. It seems to me that anytime Jesus made any reference to being rich, it was to someone who was already rich, and when being rich was talked about, Jesus was usually telling someone to give away all that they had to the poor.

Jesus never spoke a sermon about how to make money. He never asked anyone to give a faith seed. He never told anyone that God wanted them to live in a huge house drive a nice care or where expensive clothes. But, he also never said not to.
I don’t think that Jesus really cared if people were rich.He did care if they were poor.
It seems like when he was dealing with the rich, he was always trying to stir them into helping the poor. He was always hanging out with the poor, the sick and the outcasts.On more then one occasion Jesus fed people who were hungry.
Does God want you rich?I don’t know, but I know he doesn’t want you hungry.
Today is Blog Action Day. A day when bloggers from all over the world try to shed some light on a single cause: Poverty.

My life is all about building the church.

I love the church.

I really do believe that the Church of Jesus Christ could change the world.

I believe that the church could and should be the greatest social activists on the planet.We could bring food, medicine, water… Jesus.

We could be the solution to poverty.

There was a boy in the Bible that fed 5000 people with some bread and fish.How did he do it? He just showed up with what he had.Of course, he had to put down his picket signs, his political agenda, his boycott letters, and his overall prejudice of those “not in his group”… oh, wait a minute…no that’s us.

I am not being judgmental myself. In fact, this post is more for me than for anyone. As I type this, I could not tell you when the last time was I helped someone less fortunate than me, and that’s sad.

Maybe, hopefully, today is a day of change for me and others…

There are alot of great places that are doing alot of great things to try and destroy poverty in this world. Some are Christian, some are not. All of them are doing a great job.
Go to BlogActionDay.org/resources to find out who they are.One great organization I would recommend would be Somebody Cares.

It’s Wednesday night, about Midnight, and it hits me… “I’m supposed to speak in chapel tomorrow!” Not a problem. I go into my room, set my alarm for 6am, and sit down to think and pray about what I should speak on. After an hour or so, I go to bed.

It’s 6am, I jump up, get in the shower, get dressed, grab my bag with all of my stuff for the day and start to walk out the door. Just as I was about to leave, something catches my eye. It’s a clock. A clock that reads 4:30am. Yeah. That’s right, I woke up at 4am misread my alarm clock and was about to be 3 hours early for chapel.

I get back in bed, thinking I might be able to get a little more sleep… and I do. I wake up and realize it is 7:20am. I’m late.

I redress and run out the door.

I speed across town, praying that I am not going to be so late that it completely ruins that whole schedule of the school, never to be invited back again.

I pull into the parking lot of the school at the exact time that I was told chapel was going to start.

I grab my bible, jump out of the car, and quickly make my way toward the building that I think is where the school holds chapel.

As I am walking to the door, I am met by the principle. I immediately start to apologize for being late, which is one of my personal pet peeves, so you can imagine how I feel when I am the one who is late.

The principle just looks at me and says, “No problem. Chapel isn’t until next Tuesday.”

So I wasn’t late. I was early… real early.

But the good news is I was at the office before anyone else!

Right out of bed yesterday, my day started… frustrating.

I am not a person who stresses. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was actually stressed out. I do however get frustrated.

I really cannot nail down anything in particular that does frustrate me, most of the time it is something that I can’t do anything about. Whenever something comes up in my life, I usually ask the question, “is there anything I can do about this?” if there is than I do it, if there is nothing I can do, I get frustrated.

Yesterday morning was one of those days that I had exhausted all of my options in a situation that I was dealing with and it started to get to me.

I am a Christian, I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is in control of my life, and that he not only knows whats going on in my life, He wants to be an active participant in my life. I believe that, but sometimes I don’t remember that.

Yesterday, in the middle of my “crisis”, I was reminded what it says in Matthew 7:11:

“How much more shall your Father which is in Heaven give good things to them that ask Him?”

Once that sank in a bit, and I started to let some things go, BAM! things in my day began to turn around!

It ended up being a great day!

Did all of that days problems go away? No.

Is there anything new I can do in order to fix the situation? No.

Am I worried? No.

A wise man once said:

“Everything is coming up Milhouse!”

-Milhouse Van Houton, The Simpsons

The other day I am sitting in my office working and I notice something… It’s quiet.

Normally people would not find anything wrong with that, but since it was just me and my two year old daughter Reese, quiet is usually a bad sign.

I yelled out, “Reese, what are you doing?” and she responded, “PLAYING”, but it was not just her telling me what she was doing, she said it in a way that meant, “nothing dad, leave me alone, don’t come in here.”

I got up, went to our room where she was playing, and found Reese sitting on our bed, completely covered from head to toe in Lindsay’s make up.

The make up that didn’t end up on her face was smeared all over our bed.

When I look at her and asked what she was doing, she pointed at our kitten Lola, and said, “Lola did it!”

A few days later, Reese was painting in the living room. It was really our mistake to leave her with her paint alone even for one second, but we did.

When we went and checked back we found Reese not painting her paper, not even painting the table that she was working. No, she was painting Lola.

I really hope Lola survives Reese, and quite frankly I hope we survive Reese.