SORE

I am SORE. My body is not happy with me.

In the last 10 days, I've started making breakfast and lunches before taking my kids to school this fall, getting up early (and going to bed by 10pm... go figure), running 2 miles a day every morning on the treadmill, re-planted and put down a truck load of rock in 40 feet of my side yard planter bed, built a fence, ran around for 3 hours every Monday and Thursday for soccer practice while my team parents read in a lawn chair (which I think makes my legs more sore in some weird psychological way), and shoveled 2100 lbs of blue rubber bark into my kids play ground area.

Why all the yard work? Cuz we are hosting 2 parties this weekend and I wanted the junk done beforehand... cuz I'm still care how stuff looks. Someday I'll get over that- maybe. One party is for 35ish people for Jakes 4 year old birthday and one is 50ish people from our church staff on labor day.

While running on the treadmill, I've been listening/watching some DVD's. One I heard about in a podcast that was interviewing Louie Giglio. It's called indescribable and it's an amazing talk on how Big God is and how vast the universe is and how small we are. He calls the "Milky Way" galaxy our suburb in the universe and Earth is our "cul-de-sac". It was so good that I'm showing it to our students tonight in a worship night. It really makes ya think.... there's a couple of parts that I think are overstated and leave you feeling like God is a giant and he created micro-organisms on the universe scale and made them in his image and called them humans.... which is weird. Like me making an amoeba my friend, but I think that's just how I felt. The college group here watched it on Sunday night and didn't get that. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be challenged to rethink their idea of science, the universe, and your role in it. It's worth way more than the $12 it costs.

I finished that DVD and started listening to a preaching for life change DVD from Rick Warren that my last senior pastor brought back for me one year after he went and I couldn't go with him (I looked it up on the web... this puppy is expensive. Guess I should have watched it earlier). It took me 4 mornings on the treadmill to get through session 1. It was like 2 1/2 hours long. Wow... that's a lot of talking. Again, some stuff I agree with, some stuff is maybe overstated... It was interesting to hear what he thought was "shallow preaching" and what some studies have shown about content in some famous teachers from Bill Graham to Chuck Swindoll to DL Moody to yatta yatta. But today while I ran he talked about repentance and said that repentance is the goal of Biblical preaching. He said also that repentance is not life change, but thought change. Life change is the result of repentance but the Biblical term "to repent" is about changing the way we think, not doing a 180 in behavior. I'd never heard anyone say that. He then said this is why a couple of places in scripture we see that God repents. Not because he's evil, but because he changed his mind.

SIDE NOTE: I spent some time today checking on the God repented deal and found myself in Jeremiah 26. In verse 3 there's a Hebrew word translated "repent" in the NASB. Then, later on in the same chapter in verse 13, the same word is found again but this time is translated "change his mind"- both times referring to something God would do if those who heeded God's warning through Jeremiah would change. Interesting. Here's what I found in Zondervan's Pictoral Encyclopedia of the Bible (which isn't very pictoral) but under Repentance it said, "It means to turn about, to have a change of mind, to express regret. It is used of both God and man. The verb means the act of turning about; the noun means the result of such action." Well, maybe Rick was right... or maybe he has the same encyclopedia I do :)

Anyway, I guess maybe I should sit down to watch the next DVD and let my body recoup.

Maybe. Maybe I'll just beat my body into submission. Maybe it will fight back though.