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The raspberries are late this year, but they have hit their stride, and we are now in that time when we are picking extensively - at least every other day. I picked a fairly large bowl this morning before church, then after church I went out again, picking two more bowls full before the lightning got a little close for comfort and I decided to go back in and watch some baseball.

It has been a busy day of cleaning. At long last, we are moving out the debris gathered over the past 15 years, making way to organize the basement and install a wood pellet stove to help ease the sting of heating through a Minnesota winter.

But also this morning, I did my online registration for the Desiring God National Conference, to be held at the end of September in Minneapolis. I don't think I have been to an adult-oriented conference of this sort in - well, I don't know when, if ever. There were conferences with InterVarsity in college days, and lots of youth-oriented stuff. This is different, and I am going alone.

What drew me was the title. Called "The Power of Words and The Wonder of God," it stands to align beautifully with my passions for knowing God with the mind and for the power that words and the thoughts behind them have to bring us into the presence of God. I am very much looking forward to it.

This afternoon my sister Jacki sent out an e-mail to the family containing the contents of an article written by former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow last summer. It is good stuff, and I would urge you to take a look. You can read it here, from the Christianity Today web site.

We were on our way out the door yesterday when I remembered that I wanted to bring a bottle of cold water with me. I grabbed a near-empty, store-bought bottle from the car and went back into the house to rinse and fill it.

Our well water is a bit funky out of the tap. It isn't bad if it sits for awhile, though, or if it is filtered, so six years ago, in desperate need of a new refrigerator and weary of gallon jugs of drinking water sitting on the counter, we bought one of those side-by-sides with the ice and water dispensers built into the door.

Today is July 12, 2008, and I'm three days from a most significant anniversary in my life.

It must have been sometime early in our junior year in high school, which was 1972-73, when my good friend Marty got hooked up somehow with the campus chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He was something of an athlete himself, so the fit was natural for him. What was unnatural to most of the rest of our little gang, however, was the resulting change in behavior.

Romans 1:18

The other night I went to watch my young friend Audrey, who is 8 years old, play softball at Portman Square in Lakeside. I hadn't watched children so young play sports in a very long time, so I wasn't entirely prepared for just how humorous the experience can be. While all of the children were, I assume, in the same age bracket as Audrey, they certainly ranged widely in size, concentration, commitment, and ability! There were little girls who could barely hold the bat in the air, little boys who thought they were Joe Mauer at the plate, and one young guy on the other team who demonstrated very little trust in his teammates, often times running from clear across the field in order to attempt to tag out a runner rather than toss the ball to the player covering that base. That people so young can have even a rudimentary grasp of the game such as they did - a game that is really quite complex in it's rules - was amazing in itself.

It seems like I just can't buy a good night's sleep. So here I am at 2:00 AM, awake, a very long day ahead of me, tired, but unable to sleep, and as a consequence further disrupting or dismantling my efforts at creating good habits. I have work, of course, then Bri, then the rest of the garden needs watering, and then small group tonight, and I am not prepared to lead that study on Romans. I will end  up eating more than I should, particularly as I drive to town and back again, just to help me stay awake. Maybe Bri will take a good, long nap, so I, too, can sleep a bit.

I went to bed around 8:00, and set the alarm for 3:00. But that was foolish, to think I might get 7 hours of sleep. Six is the best  I can normally expect, and less is common. So at 1:15 I'm up, and, try as I might, I could not get back to sleep.

Ah, well. Enough whining! I will do a bit of reading online here, and then try to sleep a bit more, perhaps.

Avalon's Testify to Love is a song I downloaded from Amazon.com the other night. I've always liked that song.

There is a wonderful line in the second verse that says this: "All the hope in every heart will speak what love has done." Indeed, as the song suggests, ultimately every act of humanity will testify to what love - the love, of course, of Christ on the cross and risen from the grave - has accomplished.

I continue to think about music. I can't sing to save my life (how I wish I could!), and my guitar-playing days have long since come to a merciful end, but there is no question that good music impacts my spirit in important ways. I have a habit most evenings of sitting at the computer and mindlessly playing the game Free Cell while listening to various tunes - mostly theologically oriented, but often just oldies from my younger days that were much enjoyed then and that still have something going for them.

I've spent most of the afternoon - while Bri was sleeping and since Lisa picked her up - trying to import my old blog posts into this new site, but I'm not having much luck. It appears as though I will need to do a very tedious copy/paste to get it done. And if it were merely a matter of copying and pasting the content, that might not be so tough, but in order to get everything in the right sequence, I also have to copy/past three fields from two different database tables in two different databases for each and every entry. It might be awhile before I get this done.

I was going to write about some of the music I'm listening to, but there's nothing to say at the moment, except to put some of the lyrics here. This is a Charles Wesley hymn, and I am right now listening to a recording done in the 70s or 80s by Twila Paris. I can think of nothing to say about it at the moment.

Arise, my soul, arise; shake off thy guilty fears;
The bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears:
Before the throne my surety stands,
Before the throne my surety stands,
My name is written on His hands.

It's not long before church, and I have been trying to get the gallery to work just right. But there have been issues, and so I deleted some files to reload them - and lo and behold, my web site wouldn't work again. So here I am again, starting from scratch. I think I should just go sit out in the garden. But something keeps pressing me to make this thing work right.

If I had a dollar for every minute I have spent fixing computers, recovering from software or hardware errors, and just tweaking them to get to the point where I can efficiently get actual work done, I would no longer need to fix computers, recover from software or hardware errors, or try to tweak them to get more work done. I'd be able to buy acreage somewhere in the foothills of the Andes mountains miles away from the grid and never look at another electronic device again. I have a love-hate relationship with these machines, and lately it is far more the latter.

So I was working on this web site, ready to start another blog entry in a thunderstorm last evening. For just a second, the power failed, knocking everything off and then quickly starting back up.

Unfortunately, not everything started up. Whatever happened electronically, it apparently fried my network device on my computer. I am no longer able to get on the Internet at home.

That can't stay that way, so it's off to Best Buy to get a new network card after work today.

Another quick note before I try to sleep. The mail carrier left another note today to say that two more foot lockers have arrived from Iraq and are ready to pick up at the Post Office. That brings to four the containers that Jon has shipped home thus far. Another sign that homecoming is not far off.

Can't wait, Jon! Tyler borrowed your boat today for a short time; I'm sure you are looking forward to taking it out with him.

It is old and worn, this ancient (in tech terms) Gateway Solo 9550 laptop; over 5 years, now. The keyboard is mushy, and the screen hinges are worn, causing it to wobble when the computer shifts under my hands here on my lap. The sound card has long since failed for the second time, and the batteries (I have two in it) gave up on life years ago so that I no longer am able to so much as move it from place to place without shutting it down to unplug it. From time to time it refuses to start completely without the assistance of an unbended paperclip to press the recessed reset button on the bottom of the machine, and I replaced the hard drive a year ago, with the one pulled from Bryan's old machine, a 40 GB for a 30 - both so tiny in today's perspective.

But with some money I was paid for a recent job, I decided to give wireless a shot. I bought a very cheap PCMCIA wireless adapter in hopes that I might be able to tap into the network here at home. Lo and behold, it works! So here I sit, in bed, no less, no longer needing to be tethered to my desk in the basement to get online.

Late in January of this year, not much after the President announced his planned "surge" in troops to be sent to Iraq which resulted in the 4-month extension of the Minnesota National Guard's deployment to that country, Casey and I attended a planned seminar on the reintegration of soldiers returning from the war zone. The Saturday afternoon event presented excellent information for families as they prepare for the return of their soldiers. Probably the best workshop of the entire day was that on the impact of combat, presented by Chaplain Major John Morris of the Minnesota National Guard. Major Morris has been a leader in creating mechanisms to help the men and women of the nation's reserve units, those who have been at war but are not a part of the regular military support structures, to successfully return home and reintegrate into family and civilian life.

While writing the last blog entry (The Man Interrupted ), I searched the Webster's online dictionary for a particular word. In the process, I came across this wonderful program that provides a visual look at how words are related. It was cool enough - and valuable enough to anyone who writes anything, I think - that I almost immediately subscribed to the site and even paid money to do so.

The site is called The Visual Thesaurus, and if you have any interest in words or do any kind of writing, I'd highly recommend checking it out. You can test drive it for free for a limited time, but if you do write, or want to write effectively, I suspect you'll consider it well worth the $19.95/year subscription.

I sat the other day to read the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, but I never got past the first verse. That's a bit odd, because the first one or two verses of most any of the letters he wrote seem at first glance not to contain much worth mulling over, and this verse is no exception. It's nothing more than the customary greeting, the introduction of the author, followed immediately by the addressee to whom the letter is sent.

"Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God." (Ephesians 1:1)

Those few words, however, tripped my thinking about what it must have been like for Paul to live out of so explicit a sense of purpose and call; he is, after all, the man interrupted, tumbled to the ground and made briefly blind, by an encounter with Christ such as I might simultaneously long for and be terrified of. He stood up a different man, marked by the hand of God and given something to do.

I don't think there is any exaggeration or hyperbole (Casey often accuses me of both) in saying that the most important book I have ever read short of the Bible itself is the collection of essays by C.S. Lewis called The Weight of Glory. Specifically, it is the single, opening essay by that same title, and the vision and expanse of Lewis's thought revealed there, that has most impacted my own thoughts.

Unable to sleep tonight, I picked up that book and reread that essay. The result was as it always is: my thinking was awakened and came alive once again, my mind was touched and grew just a bit, and it began to bounce off the walls, so to speak, grabbing at bits and pieces of past experiences which echoed Lewis's thoughts and at fragments of Scripture that hinted at what Lewis said or that prepared me to receive it. Reading that essay late in the evening when I needed to be sleeping was exactly the wrong thing to do if a good night sleep was the primary goal.

I left work on Friday afternoon more in need of a weekend than I had been in recent memory. The past 12 days had been stressful at best, filled with extra time at work that included an 89-hour stretch from last Thursday morning until Sunday evening when I got perhaps 6 hours of sleep all told while working the Ham Lake fire on the Gunflint trail. An unusually high number of resignations at work, coupled with the demands of the fire, had meant being assigned to extra duties even apart from time at the fire itself, while commitments and duties at home and with my business mounted and backed up. It was stress that served only to magnify the normal, inner personal battles I fight so routinely. I stopped to fill the car with outrageously expensive gas at Homecroft Super Valu, prepared to come home, perhaps work in the garden just a bit, and maybe find a movie with which to relax. As I went through these motions, I considered how welcome the significant boost in my paycheck which would result from all the extra hours would truly be, a nice consolation for the weariness I felt.