I missed you!

I’ve been gone for a while. Over 6 months, if my math is correct. I could give excuses, but will any of them really make up for my absence?

I didn’t think so. 

I shouldn’t have neglected you. 

Can you ever forgive me?

Personal Training

So Megan and I have taken the plunge. We’ve set up consultation appointments with Excellence in Fitness in Annapolis on Monday.

We’re hoping the price is right enough for us to be able to afford it–otherwise it’s back to staring at our gym membership keyring cards every time we go to drive somewhere. And we all know that doesn’t help us get in shape.

We don’t have that much to spend–really we don’t have ANY to spend, but for our health and fitness, we figure we can cut back on a bunch of things and try to find about $500-$650 a month to make this work.

That’s not alot of money when you’re looking at two people. But, god-willingly it will be enough.

I’ll make sure to post an update after our consultations and let you know whats up. In the meantime…

Anyone had any experience with personal trainers? What did you think?

OQM – phones

For today’s “One Question Monday” I’d love to find out: iTunes or Android? Which do you prefer, and why?

Feeling like our prayer requests don’t measure up

I’m not sure how your church handles prayer requests, but our church handles them in two ways: we have a green card you can write your prayer request on, stick in the offering plate, and have the church leadership pray for during the week, AND we also have an open time during our worship service where attendees can raise their hand, get called on by our pastor, and publicly explain their prayer request/praise report. At the end of that time, our pastor will have one giant corporate prayer, including everyones’ request/praise.

It’s an interesting time, to say the least. I’ve heard prayer requests ranging from “my daughter has cancer” to “I just want to praise God my pap smear came back clear”(spoken from a woman who had decided to inform the entire church of her annual obgyn visit). It can get a little crazy sometimes, especially when you start comparing them–which is what I tend to do.

There are some Sundays I feel people try to one-up each other with prayer request severity. “I’ll see your neighbor with the broken leg and raise you my cousin’s car accident.”  ”Oh yeah, I’ll see that and raise you my grandma dying” “Well, today is the anniversary of my mom’s death AND my cousin’s boyfriend just came down with dysentery, so take that!” Ok, so maybe I made that last one up, but you get the idea.

Problem is, while it’s funny to watch, it also happens to paralyze me when it comes to raising my hand for my own prayer requests.

The first time it happened was about 8 months ago. I had been feeling sick, but forced myself to go to church because I hadn’t been in a while.

Prayer Request time came around, and I got ready to raise my hand. Then it happened.

Before I stretch my arm to the ceiling and declare myself sick, someone else raised their hand and was called on. Their neighbor had cancer.

Right after that request, someone else raised their hand and spoke about how their father was about to have some kind of heart surgery.

After that, there was a death in the family.

My heart sunk. There was no way I could raise my hand now. What would I say? “Yes, I’ve had a bit of a cold for the past couple of days, I’d just like prayer to feel better.” 

I could envision it now: “God, please help John Doe get through his life threatening heart surgery. Please be with Jane Doe as she deals with this breast cancer. Oh, and help Nick feel better from his man-cold.”

I would be a laughing stock. No way my prayer request would ever match up to the severity of cancer or heart surgery. So I kept quiet.

And while I know God does not look at prayer requests that way, I can’t help but feel a little inadaquate. I start comparing my prayer requests to everyone else’s, and when I judge mine to be less severe, I stay silent, almost as if God would rather not hear about it.

“Don’t worry about me God! Deal with the heart surgery and the cancer–I’ll be ok” 

Thankfully, that’s not how God works. He doesn’t sit there in Heaven ranking our prayer requests by how bad they sound, and then doling out answers to them in order of severity. If He did, I think we’d ALL be in trouble, cause there are some really desperate and needy people in the world. But there I go again, comparing prayer requests!

And so I have to remind myself of that every once in a while, and send up my prayer request even if I don’t think it will ‘measure up’ to everyone else’s.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever felt like you had an inadequate  prayer request? What did you do about it?

Who will you be: A Call to Arms to Read More

I’ve heard it said that five years from now, you’ll be the same person you are today except for the people you’ve met and the books you’re read.

To me you’re not reading any books, that means the only thing left to influence who you will become is the people you meet.

Since I’m in a “service” industry, I tend to meet a lot of people. And whether I want them to or not, each person will change me–for better or for worse. Hopefully it’s for the better. I don’t think anyone wants to meet people who will change them for the worse.

But I know I will. Between now and five years from now, I’m sure I’ll meet people who are annoying, argumentative, rude, cynical, close-minded, who know just which of my buttons to push to really turn me ugly. And there is nothing I can really do about it.

Sure, I could try to shelter myself from those people, but in doing so I would also be sheltering myself from people who would influence/change me in a good way. Isolation is not the answer.

What I can do however, is minimize the effect those people have on me.

And how will I do that?

By becoming more of who I am through a method I can control rather than through a method that I can’t control.

Through reading books.

Through reading books I know will inspire me to live better, love better, be better. Choosing to read books that will challenge me and push me out of my comfort zone, books that will help to teach me skills and knowledge I have yet to learn.

From DIY home improvement books to inspirational and business best sellers, from blogs about gourmet cooking to news articles about the latest tech toys, I resolve to watching tv less and reading more. To putting down the remote and picking up my Kindle.

All that is left is to gather up the books and reading.

What’s one book you found invaluable to who you are becoming?

Inviting people over forces me to clean

I have a confession to make. Brace yourself, it’s a big one.

I’m a messy person.

There are dishes in the sink from 4 days ago. There’s dirty laundry on the floor, and clean laundry piled on our dining table. My xbox games look like they’re taking over our entertainment center. The bathroom sink is covered in a combination of facial hair, cat hair, toothpaste and mouthwash stains. Our coffee tables has the remnants of a few fast food meals. And theres a pile of old mail on our kitchen island that looks like the beginning of a Horders episode.

But you’ll never see any of this.

Because if you ever call us one night and say you’re on your way over and you’ll be here in 15 minutes, Megan and I suddenly develop super speed not even the Flash can compete with. And 11.5 minutes later, when we answer the door sweaty and out of breath, I promise we weren’t finishing up a quickie–we were making our place spotless and awesome for you, our guest.

And the first thing you’ll comment on is how our place always looks so perfect, while we ask you to mind the mess.

Crazy, right? But I know we can’t be the only ones that do the cleaning dash whenever someone calls unexpectedly and says they’re stopping by.

But I do think we may be the only ones who invite people over a couple times a week to force ourselves to clean our house.

I’m not sure why we don’t clean up regularly. We just don’t.We’re too busy. We’re too lazy. We’re hardly ever home, We’re home so often the mess blends into the background. Pick your excuse-any excuse-we don’t care.

For whatever reason, we just don’t clean regularly. We tried setting up a cleaning schedule “We’ll clean on Mondays, since it’s our day off from work” Yeah, we did that once. Why? Because it’s our day off from work! Who wants to clean then? Not me.

But you’ll never see place a mess. Because even though we don’t clean on a regular basis, when we do clean, man do we clean!

Come over and you’d swear we were allergic to dust and dirt and grime and filth, because you won’t find any of it in our home.

Keep that in mind if we ever invite you over. Yes, we may really want to hang out with you, but what we want even more is a clean house.

One Question Mondays

I’m starting a new thing today–One Question Mondays(or OQM, for those of you who simply love abbriviations!) The way I see it, every Monday I’ll ask a random question and we can all see where the conversation leads us. What do you think?

(ha ha, get it? The first question for OQM is what you think of it!)