Yesterday afternoon I hopped into our gold mini-van with my three daughters and two of their friends. We headed happily down the road toward Ft. Wayne to see “Winter Jam” an annual concert event with 5-6 great Christian bands and a speaker. My girls and I have probably been to 4-5 Winter Jams in the past few years and love it every time. We had been looking forward to it for several months.
The cool thing about Winter Jam is that the tickets are only $10 each. Of course, there is no reserved seating so you have to get there early to get a good seat. We didn’t think about the fact that if enough peeps showed up, you have to get there early to get a seat period. Well, we weren’t as early this year with the 2-hour drive and having to wait until school was out to take off so when we got there, the doors had already opened and there was a mile-long line twisting and winding all through the broad parking lot. 
At least it was sunny out, even though still chilly. We waited, walked a few steps, waited some more, hoped and hoped as we got closer that before long the line would really start moving and we’d be finding our way to some seats and an awesome evening of music, shouting, standing and clapping, and fun.
A guy came out and started walking from the back of the line up toward where we stood. We heard him telling people something as he walked along. As he got closer we heard him talking about an extra music appearance at a local church following the concert and then he turned to us and said, “You’re not getting in. Sold out show.” After a moment of shock and disbelief, the line started breaking up as the people around us began to wander back to their cars, vans and church buses. We stood there for a moment looking at each other – “What?!” “No way!” Continue reading
Has your computer ever crashed? Have you ever had to completely format the hard drive and re-install everything, starting over? I’ve been through this ingratiating process a few times and while it’s aggravating enough to pull some hair and can be a big pain if you lose files or data, it is nice to have a fresh start. When the disk has been completely wiped clean and loaded up anew with the programs it runs so much better and more quickly. There aren’t all those downloaded, uploaded, accumulated files and programs that piled up over the last year or so. All the temp files that were dragging the system down are gone. Any spam or spy ware – gone! It’s clean and zippy – ready to go. You can almost hear your computer sigh a happy “ahhhhh.”
I don’t really know how to let go of this dream. It’s a daily process – trying to remain content and thankful and focus on other things. It’s interesting the things that make us feel settled in our hearts and souls: having a permanent residence, all belongings moved in and in their places, a steady job, a routine we’re used to, comfort zone stuff. Vice versa, temporary situations, not having all your belongings accessible to you, lots of change, living with someone else and feeling like you’re an outsider – like it’s not really your home – all of these seem to keep the contentedness of heart at bay. There seems to be a longing inside most of us to have a place, to have a home, to be settled down.
Along the Narrow Path 