Ah, me. Just finished book three of Lord of the Rings. I'm takin' it nice and slow, finally. It's soooooo good.

So there's this 'event' during the month of August called "Hot August Nights," during which the whole of Reno's casino parking lots are filled with old restored cars. Cool. I hope I get to go at least a few times!

Life is so strange and twisting and winding. I remember Mr. Joe Z one time saying that God's pathways aren't always perfectly straight; no, in fact, as I recall him saying, they are curving and winding and sometimes go backwards and zigzaggy and stuff. He doesn't mean that the way to Heaven is twisty-turny (Matthew 7:13-14), but that God's will for our personal pathways can be. Everything isn't always crystal-clear; everything doesn't always work out how we planned it, and that's why life requires faith. It requires a step out into the unknown, which in itself demonstrates a heart desiring to find out if that first step was a step into the 'right' direction--a direction that God wills. I am finding out more and more that I need to live by the Spirit, not the flesh. There are two desires fighting within me. But sitting around feeling bad about myself because I don't automatically do the right things all the time because I am not perfect inside is not going to change me. Doing what I know is right despite desiring to sin inside will help me change. Of course, it is God's work. But like I said before, this sort of acting oneself into doing the right thing is an act of faith in the belief that I profess, which is that God has made me new and clean and a new creature, a child of God. (1 John 2: 28-3:10; specifically 3:4-10) And that, my friends, is way cool. Let us live by grace. Let grace be, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, the answer to the equation, and not the data for the equation. Something huge that I learned in Mammoth (and keep forgetting) is that I do not always believe that I am a child of God; therefore, no wonder I do not behave as one! But if I believe in what He says I am...a child of God and no longer Adam's flesh...well then, why should I not behave as one!