It has been a crazy couple of weeks! Too much personal stuff to actually go into here, but suffice it to say it has been stressful on almost all of us. Work has been crazy, too. But on the good side, Chase has a job. He drives out to Kingwood each day, which is quite a trip … a little over an hour if the traffic is good. But it’s a job and he works for a nice guy.

Otherwise we’re all doing okay.

1. Walking can add minutes to your life. This means that at age 85, you get to spend an additional 5 months in a nursing home at a cost of $7,000 per month.

2. My grandpa started walking 5 miles a day when he was 60. Now he’s 97 and we don’t know where he is.

3. I like long walks … especially when they’re taken by people who annoy me.

4. I have to walk early in the morning before my brain figures out what I’m doing …

5. I joined a health club last year and spent about $400. Haven’t lost a pound. Apparently you have to GO there.

6. Every time I hear the dirty word “exercise,” I wash my mouth out with chocolate.

7. The advantage of exercising every day is so when you die they’ll say: “My, doesn’t she look good!”

This time reading through the Bible from beginning to end is proving to be very different than the last time. During that time God gave me something I called WORD PLAY, basic spiritual principles He revealed from Scripture passages as I was reading. I named it WORD PLAY because one (or sometimes more) word(s) from that passage would get my attention. I did a “play on words,” if you will, comparing the Webster Dictionary definition with what God meant when He used that word or words. They were originally written for my own spiritual walk but maybe I’ll share them with you some time. Meanwhile …

I’ve thought a lot about the Israelites during my reading. Although I’m almost at the end of 2 Chronicles now, lately I’ve wondered why the Israelites just didn’t do what God told them to do! Instead, they actually wandered around in the wilderness for 40 years … a million people in the same area for 40 years! Go figure.

Then it occurred to me that I’m no different . I know that God expects obedience … a pure heart … loving Him with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind … can’t plead ignorance there because I have God’s Word to tell me. So why don’t I obey!? Am I stiff-necked? I realized that too many times in my past I lingered and wandered in the wilderness of life much longer than God would have desired me to do … sometimes even stuck in the same area for longer than I should have been. Ouch! It can be painful to get REAL with God, but what a blessing we get out of it.

So, my prayer personally is that I will become more obedient. Not just HEAR when God speaks, but HEED what He says. Are you ready to take that journey also? Think about it …

What a whirlwind yesterday was! Mike and Erica went to an orienteering meet at Sam Houston National Park this weekend. It’s about an hour and a half north of Houston. Stubblefield, the section of the park where the meet was held, is thickly wooded and difficult to navigate through even for experienced orienteers. Anyway, one 13-year old boy got confused on his course and was missing for 24 hours.

The course he was navigating should have taken … at the most … 45 minutes to complete. When he was 2 hours late returning to camp, they sent out search parties. After another 2 hours they called the Park Ranger and Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department who promptly sent out search teams to help. As dark fell, they called the Coast Guard, who house a helicopter with infrared cameras at Ellington Field (Houston area). They searched all night and found him around 10 am this morning. The temperatures dropped into the low 30’s overnight so they were worried about the young boy not having warm enough clothes on. Anyway, Mike helped search yesterday and got home about 10 pm last night. He was planning to go back up there this morning if they weren’t having success finding him.

And to top it all off … yesterday was Mike’s birthday! What a way to spend it, right?