I’ve always felt a little bit like prayer had no purpose other than as a ritual to demonstrate how much I loved God.  I was certainly no expert in the in’s and out’s of Omnipresent and Omniscient, but I was pretty sure that God knew everything I was praying about.  So naturally I often wondered, what’s the purpose of this anyway?

Am I reminding God of something he forgot about?  Does he ever get a startled look on his face when I pray "God, so distant and powerful, I want to remind you about that thing that my friend is dealing with right now." He never actually answered me by saying "Oh yeah, that thing…. Don’t worry, I got it covered, thanks for reminding me….", so I always suspected it was kind of pointless to bring up stuff as if he didn’t already know.

But something inside me knew that there had to be a reason to pray for someone.  We’re not alerting God of a situation he wasn’t aware of.  He’s not watching our prayers like we watch the news to get the latest updates.  He’s already ahead of us on all of this stuff, but there has to be some reason he wants us to pray.

In order to understand it, I think we have to look at what his entire purpose of creating us was.  Relationship.  For whatever reason, God keeps wanting to involve us in his will on earth.  Sounds crazy, knowing how good I am at taking care of my own responsibilities, but for some reason he gives me the opportunity to interject my disfunctions into his divine will instead of just letting me sit on the sidelines.

So I think I’m starting to learn that prayer is not about waking God up from his power nap after church to remind him that one of my friends just got fired and needs a job.  It’s about realizing that he’s already working in that person’s life, and all he wants me to do is agree with him here on earth that I want His will to be done in that person’s life.

"Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven".

Nothing ruins a good action movie like the main character drifting off into some daydream sequence, away in some peaceful place with his family……

When I watched "The Gladiator" with Russell Crow years ago, I was in awe.  That’s the kind of movie that makes you want to be noble, to do the right thing, and in some weird way learn how to fight with a sword. (more…)

There’s a saying in the software world "Good, Fast, Cheap, pick two".  The basic premise is that you can make software that is good, and it’s done fast, but it won’t be cheap.  Or it can be done fast, and cheaply, but it won’t be good.  Or it will be good, and cheap, but it will take forever.

It seems to me that in our culture, there’s a widespread trend of buying lots of stuff, as soon as you can, for as cheaply as you can.  This brings me back to the title of this post. (more…)

Recently while Lori was away on a business trip, God sideswiped me with something I was definitely not prepared for. Throughout our almost 5 year marriage, there have been many times when I stepped out of the role of a husband and into the role of a teacher. Talking to her as if she was a kid who needed instruction. She would tell me how much this upset her, but I never really knew why. (more…)

Waiting in line at Subway is not normally the place to have revelation, but I’ll take it wherever I can get it. I evaluated all the meat-containing subs, and was about to choose one of them, when I remembered what Lori had told me the week before. Processed, preserved meats have a connection with cancer. (more…)

I’ve gotten awfully comfortable with God over the past year.  As I learned how integrated He is with everything I do,  I have experienced a great deal of peace as I stopped running, stopped pushing for more accomplishments. 

However I find myself now facing some new things in life that could mean some radical changes to the structure I’ve gotten used to.  (more…)

I used to be obsessed with being right.  Being right about the bible, being right about the existence of God, and most of all, being right about proving all the godless unbelievers wrong who dared question my beliefs.  A funny thing happened though…. I started to experience the love of the God I had tried so hard to defend.  And I stopped caring about being right. (more…)

This is part 3 of a 3 part series called Hidden In Plain Sight.  For proper context please see Part 1 and Part 2.

Square Pegs, Round Holes

Over the past 12 years, I’ve developed some interesting skills.  I developed the strang ability to mimic the guitar style of Stevie Ray Vaughan, arguably the best blues guitarist of all time.  I also taught myself how to build websites in my spare time. Another computer related skill set I’ve also learned is the art of studio recording and video editing.  To top it off, I was surprised to learn that I make a pretty good teacher on subjects I care about.

So here were 4 fairly disjoint skills that I picked up, and for the longest time I felt like I had a bunch of square pegs and my life was made of round holes.  How in the world could all these things fit together? (more…)

There’s Millions Inside Them There Mistakes!

There are very few ideas that cannot be imitated, duplicated, copied or bested. But there is one man who had such an idea. An idea so good that it befuddled his competition. Hidden in plain sight. Waiting to be discovered.

The idea was based on a mistake.  A mistake that millions of people make every day.  In a hurry to type in the .com at the end of some website addresses, an awful lot of people type .cm instead of .com.  So you end up seeing a website you didn’t intend to see, or you see a message telling you that there’s no website at this address.

But it seems that ".cm" is a special mistake.  Every country has it’s own offical "domain suffix".  The UK is ".co.uk", German is ".de", and as it turns out, ".cm" is the offical domain suffix for the country of Cameroon.  This small twist made one man, a Christian, very rich.  Let’s find out why… (more…)

Yesterday I got 1200 pageviews in one day on my guitar lesson website.  At the same time, I got 2300 video views in one day on YouTube.  Since December, people have sent me donations, hand made guitar pedals, and asked me to put out DVD lessons for them to buy.  I’ve had at least 3 people buy a guitar amp, and one person buy a guitar after watching my videos.  Two other people bought the same pedals I use. 

What’s even more surprising?  3 months ago, I hadn’t even thought about doing my first lesson. (more…)