Nonsensical Ramblings of Mark

The Word is a sword that pierces the heart And its truth is a light that cuts through the dark Of this world. Nations shall rise and nations shall fall But nothing shall stand in the way Of the Word.  - Iona The older I grow and the more I see, the less I am enamored with people's opinions, observations, and reports unless they line up with the Word of God found in the Bible. I know that there are a million different interpretations of problematic passages in the Bible, but, as Mark Twain was fond of saying, "It isn't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me. It is the parts I do understand." There were (are?) so many times in my life that I let my emotions or clouded perspective get in the way of the truth. I speak nothing but lies to myself and sometimes even to others. Those are the times that I am not so much in love with the truth, but in love with myself or in "love" with the other person I am lying to.  B...

I, generally, do not post many normal things for my status updates on Facebook. Sometimes my not-so-normal statuses just pop into my head and I get them into cyberspace before they leave my brain. Other times they follow a clear progression. This morning's update was of the latter variety. I had a little bit of my travel coffee cup fall of yesterday so I needed to use some superglue to get it affixed to where it was. I did that this morning and was proud of myself because, well, I didn't get any superglue on my fingers. This is a rare enough occasion that I thought I would herald it on Facebook: "Mark Dudley managed to use superglue this morning without getting any on his fingers." Well, that seemed a bit to ordinary so I thought it would have to make it a bit more unusual in the following manner: "Mark Dudley managed to use superglue this morning without getting any on his fingers. His gums, however..." But then I got nervous. What if my wife reads th...

Thankfully I had some time that I could steal on Saturday and Sunday to review the message I was going to give at the jail so I felt very prepared. That is not always the case with me so that was something pretty new. Well, Sunday night rolled around and I experienced a bunch of somethings at the jail that I had not experienced before. When we got into the gym we noticed that there was not a ton of chairs set up in the place. It was a playoff football night so I expected that there would not be as many people there than in previous nights, but the amount of chairs that were set up depressed me a little. Then the prisoners came in and kept coming. We had around 80 people there which is a good size for our service, but I had never seen so many women before in all my years of going to the jail with Northridge. Half of the group were women and it was good to see so many. Well, when I got up to preach on Luke 15 there was no movement in the room at all. Sometimes things get a little row...

C.S. Lewis reminds me that I need to think in this manner when it comes to prayer: I prayed, and it happened. In other words I need to report on the bare facts and know that correlation does not imply causation. I can't get all wrapped up in the "Was I the only one praying for this?" or "What if I hadn't prayed....would I have gotten the same result?" I know God has a million reasons for everything that happens, and I know that I was not the only one praying for the service in this circumstance, and that I may never know all of the everything I want to know about last Sunday night but.... We have been studying prayer and I have been confessing that I do not pray anywhere near as often as I should for much of anything. I used to pray quite a bit on my ride into work so I decided to resurrect that last week. I prayed for my boys and wife as they embarked on another day of homeschooling. I prayed for the teaching that I would be delivering that week and for h...

What have I done? Who have I hurt? Who has left me? Who have I left? Where am I now that, if someone told me I'd be where I am, that I would not have believed them? The easy answer is "here", but where is my heart? What is true about me that is taking me farther from God and closer to destruction? Is this the life that I have always wanted? Am I beyond hope? Is my past so littered with sin and regrets that I can't see anything but a future full of what my past is? Am I useful to anyone anymore? Does anyone listen to me anymore? I have no strength apart from Him. I have no wisdom except His. I am done doing my own thing - because there is nothing good that can come from me groping my way along the wall in the dark. I have nothing but the voice that He has given to me and one, single, word: "Help." And on the other side there He is with gifts that I don't deserve and a love that withholds that which I do. There He is with the breath that will regener...

Well, day fifteen isn't really day fifteen as we started all of this on December 5, 2013 and it is now January 12, 2014, but I guess it is just the number of days that I bothered writing anything on the blog and/or you bothered reading it. Thanks for going on this journey with us and the tons of encouragement you gave us. It meant a lot to us to be able to share this with you and to receive so much positive feedback from all of you. So...here are the proverbial before and after pictures: Before: After: It is all pretty dramatic and we are thrilled that it turned out the way it did. We are still in the midst of finding a place for everything (you should have seen how much stuff I put "just out of sight"), but we are much closer than we were even this morning. Thanks, God, for seeing this through for us. Help us to always know you are out for our good even when we cannot see your hand or sense your good pleasure.

Day fourteen found the guys putting in more than a full day's worth of work as they wanted to set the stage to finish up the next day. We actually had to leave one of them to his work while we went to share dinner with friends of ours (thanks Carlos and Jill!) and hang out with their new daughter Kirsten. Here is where we are now: This is the new hanging microwave. It is high up, but we are tall. This is the tile on the window wall. This is a close up of the tile and the accent with cardboard spacers. See all of those black squares? When we bought them at the Home Depot they were all brown squares. We then went to a tile place and bought one square foot of accent tile that had 144 one inch black squares, cut those all apart, and then replaced the brown squares the with black ones. Surprisingly it did not take us too long to do and we are happy with the result. The under cabinet lighting was also installed. We went with an LED ribbon that is hardwired into two switc...