The 4th of July has always been a special day for Stephanie and I, because that’s the day we met!
A year ago we took the extended Independence Day weekend and went camping in Asheboro.
Steph was a solid 5 months pregnant at the time, and she was a trooper! We camped through rain and hail, woke up wet, grilled inside our tent, and walked for miles at the zoo. It was awesome!
Since we met three years ago, we have yet to take a real vacation together. We managed to sneak off for a week for our honeymoon, but even that seemed rushed, and we haven’t had anything longer than an extended weekend since.
But all that changes starting today, because we are off on our first ever Riesland family vacation!
We’ll be stopping at Stone Mountain, the Georgia Aquarium, Panama City Beach (gonna see the new home of the Statons), and Charleston (gonna see the new home of the Flaglers)!
We’ll be back next weekend, and will probably be online intermittently between now and then, so please be patient if it takes us a couple days to reply to emails.
In the meantime, have a great first week of July!
Tags: vacation
As I mentioned in the introduction, Religion Saves + And Nine Other Misconceptions addresses the top nine questions submitted and voted on by people around the country.
Each chapter is dedicated to a question and pastor Mark’s answer, and they go in backwards order.
So, chapter one addresses the ninth most popular question:
There’s no doubt the Bible says children are a blessing, but the Bible doesn’t seem to address the specific topic of birth control. Is this a black-and-white topic, or does it fall under liberties?
Last week, I asked you all to share your thoughts on this comment, and boy did you come through!
Tags: birth control, book review, crossway, mark driscoll, religion saves, relit
For those of you who don’t know…Zack and I are training for the 1/2 marathon in Virginia Beach on September the 6th. That’s 13.1 miles! I know it’s crazy. Right before Zack and I got engaged he ran the 1/2 marathon in 2006. I just kept thinking, wow.. I can totally do this. Everything in your head always seems more logical than when you’re actually doing it. So about 9 weeks ago I told Zack that I wanted to do the half marathon. I had “talked about it” numerous times. He is such a sweet and encouraging husband because he said “I’ll totally run it with you” (love him!) So I began running hard for the first couple of days, which wasn’t really a good idea because my knees started to really bother me. I didn’t have the right shoes so we ventured to 9th street to get some Brooks, which I hope will take me all the way to the race.
Tags: half-marathon, running
Look what came in the mail yesterday!
The awesome folks at Crossway and RE:LIT were kind enough to select our dinky little blog here for a free copy of Mark Driscoll’s newest book, Religion Saves - And Nine Other Misconceptions.
One condition: I have to review it here and tell you what I think.
This is a lot like telling a kid that he can have a piece of candy, but only if he promises to eat it, so I’m quite happy to oblige.
Tags: christianity, crossway, jesus, mark driscoll, religion, religion saves, relit
Tags: father's day, parenting
A few days ago, I posted this picture for a caption.
Well, apparently my friend John has a little too much time on his hands these days, cause yesterday he sent this to me.
What can I say? It works…
Speaking of John: he’s a bona-fide video and photoshop ninja, and he’s currently feeling the pain of the recession, so if you’ve ever thought about having a video done for just about any occasion, you should cruise over to his website and see what’s up. He’ll take great care of you!
My mom hired him to make this video a couple of years back (in 2 parts - after the jump)
Tags: baby, funny picture, silly
I know nobody cares about pictures without people in them, but I’m stuck waiting for something, so here are a couple shots from the last week or two.
The flower is from our front yard, and the field was just something that caught my attention one day when I happened to have the camera in the car, so I pulled over. The lighting wasn’t very favorable, but ah well…
(you can click on them to see a slideshow, and there are a couple more after the drop)
Tags: field, flower, photography
I stumbled across this awesome video over at Joanna Muses.
Two very talented guys take a piano and cello and mix an instrumental combo of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” and Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida“.
If anyone figures out a cool way to track this to an mp3, please let me know!
Tags: coldplay, instrumental, love story, music, taylor swift, viva la vida
So, Thursday night, after 7 months, I caved.
The ‘fro was out of control, and after changing my mind several times a day for the past couple of weeks, I bit the bullet and lopped off all my hair for the first time since the week Josiah was born.
It was bittersweet.
When the security guard at work saw me Friday morning, he spoke to me for the first time in his life: “Wow! Did you lose a bet?”
Sigh….
This is a short video from Sermon Jams featuring a sermon snippet from a modern-day hero of mine: John Piper (who is on twitter!).
Listen to him spell out Paul’s teachings about displaying Christ as your treasure!
Tags: christ, desiring god, john piper, perspective, sermon jams
I got a package from FedEx yesterday. It’s a couple dozen papers that I need to sign, releasing authorization to my lawyers to ask for information from pretty much every employer, doctor, and educator I’ve ever had.
I’ve been getting packages like this every couple of months for the past 5 (or so) years.
Because I’m in a class action law suit.
Tags: christianity, scripture
We first noticed him doing this the day before we took this video.
Now it’s a few days later and he still says ‘Ada da da’ whenever you ask him to say ‘momma’.
I should probably feel kind of bad, but, well, let’s be honest: my kid is freakin’ awesome!
Tags: babel, baby, first words, video
I spent Thursday through Saturday at the Advance 09 conference at the Durham Performing Arts Center.
Advance 09 was sort of the springboard for Advance The Church, which you might describe as a movement dedicated to shifting the momentum of christianity in America from hypocrisy, politics, morality, pragmatism, and judgment to a hyper-focus on Jesus, His death, burial, and resurrection, and all the consequences that follow from that.
A joint effort of TheResurgence, DesiringGod, and Acts 29, I was interested in the conference as soon as I heard about it, and especially because it happened only about 30 minutes from my house, I prayed seriously about whether to go; but I was also hesitant because it was a little expensive and also required a day off work. But God seemed to really nudge me to get there, and He seriously cleared a path to make the decision easy.
In the end, I walked away with so much. I still feel like my head is going to explode. If I took the time to write out everything that happened this weekend, you probably wouldn’t even have time to read it, but here is some processing by way of bullet points (you can also download the entire conference audio here for free):
Tags: advance09, advancethechurch, desiringgod, theresurgence
