Of the (extremely) random variety

[Photos from our drive]

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"The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life. The Bible’s purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome… religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things." -Tim Keller

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Tomorrow morning a Doctor in Haiti that reminds me exactly of Edna Mode from The Incredibles movie will be fixing up my long-ignored sun-damaged skin.

I make most of my decisions by indecision, and this is no exception. I have made and canceled two dermatologist appointments in the last year. For some reason today was the day that I forced myself to go see someone. Oh - yeah, Troy refusing to let me come back to the car without seeing her might have helped a little bit.

I loved when she chewed me out for being fair skinned with blue eyes. And then she reminded me that all the idiotic tanning I did in 8th grade was now coming back to haunt me. Well duh. I know that. I've known for a year! We used to skip out of North View Junior High around noon to go lay on tin foil in Lisa's back yard ... I earned this visit with the knife tomorrow.

Because this is Haiti and because I am stubborn I am letting her do the ones on my chest and torso and not the one on my face. Once the pathology report comes back and we check the quality of her work- then I will see about allowing a cartoon character to cut on my face.

Annie had a rough day too. She had immunizations and took a rather uncomfortable back-seat nap.
When I finished up with Dr. Edna Mode I came to a car with four mostly happy kids, one happy Daddy - and this gift! :)



Switching gears ...
I know non-runners hate running talk. But I love it. Love to talk running. Counting the minutes till Beth is back so we can get on the road together Wednesday. I liked what Ryan said so I am pasting in the end of his recent post-marathon report here. { Go here for full post. }

I guess you know where this is going. But, it’s sad that we don’t see this atmosphere in the Christian church. For 26 miles - for 3 hours and 50 minutes and 54 seconds, all I heard was cheering. People never looked at me and said, “You need to run faster!” or “Your stride is wrong!” In fact, they lied to me a lot and said, “Hey, you’re looking great!” I hurt, but there they were. There are people who are hurting in the world today, and what do we do? Nothing most of the time. They run by us, limping, wondering when they’re going to make it to the finish line, and we just stand there, silent. Some people might not be hurting, they might just be tired, and we don’t say a word. In fact, we look past them for someone we know. We hold up our sign for our friends, but for that other person, chasing the same goal as our friend, we leave them alone. Maybe they’re not hurting, or tired. Maybe they’re looking super strong. How much stronger could they be?

Paul continually speaks in his letters of encouraging one another. In fact, in Romans 12, he references this as a spiritual gift. Every single Christian you know is running a race. Will you encourage them today?