Hey - what happened to this blog?

Not too bad. 10 days since my last post.

I have made some changes. I will no longer be posting my thoughts on the 40 Days of Purpose. I have elected to share those thoughts with my wife as we daily discuss the readings that we are doing. Between that and the painting of the exterior of our house, I have had little energy to actually put together any complete sentences for my thoughts.


We are almost finished with our painting. We just have a small are left and will try and knock that out in the next couple of days. We are starting to be pressed for time due to the weather being a little cooler this week. God really blessed us this last week with some warm weather to allow us to get this completed. I will say that I have had fun doing this. The first 15-20 minutes of the project gave a pretty dreary outlook. I actually thought at one point that my marriage could have ended. Not really, but really.

See, my wife and I have 2 different idea of how a project should be approached. I like to decide what I am going to, get the supplies necessary to do it, then start somewhere. Her way is a little different. She liked to decide what she is going to do - we are still okay up to this point - then likes to plan out how she is going to go about doing the project. This step bothers me because it can take upto months to get the right "how" in place. In the meantime, I would have already completed the project. The next step for her is to then purchase the materials needed. Followed by re-visiting the "how to" of her plan. This last step will be conducted up to the time that I actually begin "doing" the project. In our case, even after I had begun applying paint to the walls, she felt the need to explain to me how we should be doing it differently and how we should change where we are starting to accommodate the weather and the supplies and the napping children and the blah, blah, blah.

This was about the time that I snapped. I decided that the best thing for me to do was to go to Home Depot and pick up an S-hook to attach the paint bucket to my ladder. Although this was not an item of necessity, it was the trip rather than the item that was most important. It was during my 45 second drive to Home Depot that I recalled one of the messages that I had read in my 40 Days of Purpose course. It talked about altering your thinking to focus on doing everything that you do for God rather than for others. If you have a crappy boss at work that makes it difficult for you to be happy, then you should remember that God wants you there for a reason and you should focus on doing your job for God as a sign of worship. Worship is not simply limited to singing and dancing, but it is also the way that we are able to show God our love for Him through everything that we do. From the first day that we have lived in this house, we have known in our hearts and shared from our lips that this house was given to us by God. There are too many circumstances that surrounded the purchase of it for me to get into, but the only way that we acquire this house if by God's hand. I decided during my drive that if I was going to continue to hold strong to that blessing, then I needed to change my attitude and paint that house not for me or for my wife, but for God. And I needed to do it with joy and love in my heart. It does no good to do something for someone else, when it is done out of resentment or frustration. True thankfulness comes when someone gives with joy and from their heart.

As I returned home, I needed...No, I wanted to make things right between my wife and I. How strange was it that before I could let the words escape my lips, she said to me that while I had been gone, she had done some thinking. She felt that we needed to not worry about the process of "how" to paint this house, but we needed to focus on "why " we were painting and "who" we were painting it for. She wanted to make sure that we remembered that this was God's house and that we needed to be painting it for Him.


What a Great Weekend!!!!!