Our trip to Ocean Isle, N.C.
Here are a couple vacation recommendations. Go out of your way to visit family and friends. By adding a couple of hours to our travel time we were able to see my mom, aunt, uncle, cousin, plus friends we haven't seen for 7 years. And once at the beach we stayed with friends that have children about the same age as ours. Our rental house was not on the beach but instead on a salt marsh. Surprisingly, this added a lot to our stay. The children used chicken-necks and twine to catch more than 20 crabs (3 varieties) right off the dock. Once cooked, we taught them how to eat their catch. Some locals used their net to shrimp behind our unit and gave us a bag full of their catch. We watched pelicans and bitterns circle and then plunge for fish each evening. Plus the little town put on a free blue-grass concert on our last night there!

Piper's Preaching
I finished listening to a recent Founder's conference. John Piper's message on the purpose of glorification both hit hard and filled me with awe. It's a sermon worth hearing many times and I can't express his message nearly as articulately as he did yet, but I want to mention two of his points. The first is about heaven and why we're wrong to think of it as boring. In heaven we'll still be finite beings, God is the only infinite Person. So our finite but sinless self will experience ever-increasing joy and ever-mounting ecstasy as we discover more and more of the goodness and fullness of God. His mercies will indeed be new every morning! The second point hit hard and showed that most teaching on glorification is man-centered. Since we know what joy lies ahead, we should remember that to die is gain. We should be willing to show that our love for Christ has penetrated our entire being so that we're undeterred by persecution, trouble, poverty, sickness in this life. We fail to show that our love for Christ is more than our love for this life.

Guitar-Man
My family presented me with a nice guitar for Father's Day. I underestimated the difficulty in fingering the chords. One millimeter of placement makes a significant difference. It's going to take a lot of practice to build up flexibility in my fingers to hit the right spots.