Imagine this. You wake up. You are having a bad day. You’re attitude is Mr. Grumpy Gus. I’m sure you have had days like this. I know I have. If you are anything like me on your bad day you really do not want to talk to anyone, and you sometimes just want to retreat to a place of solitude.

Let me share with you a moment where I was recently in a grumpy mood and just flat out mad. You see some guys and I went on a five day backpacking trip the first half of Spring Break. We had been having a great time and were on our second to last day in the forest. We knew the night before that we were going to be for some rain on the next day so we took some extra precautions in setting up our tents. We wanted to make sure we were going to stay dry as we slept.

Long about 3 in the morning I woke up to the sound of rain on the tent. I rolled over and my feet got wet. This meant one of two things. Either I had a serious bladder problem, or we had water in our tent. The good news of this story, it wasn’t a serious bladder problem. The bad news, Augie and I woke up with several puddles of standing water in our tent. Much of our gear, like our sleeping bags and sleeping pads, was wet. Even the few extra clothes I had packed for the trip were wet, and they were inside my hiking pack. This wasn’t how I expected to start this day. Needless to say, I never really did fall back asleep after I discovered the water. I found myself just laying there mad that my tent, which was water proof, somehow had leaked water to the inside.

As I laid there in my wet sleeping bag from 3am to around 6am, when we were going to wake up and get ready for our next hike, I just kept thinking to myself how mad I was. Somewhere around 5:30 I started humming songs to myself and I’m not really sure why, but an old familiar song popped into my head. I hadn’t heard this song but a few times since I left my home church when I went to college. The chorus goes like so:

“This is the day that the lord has made

I will rejoice and be glad in it

This is the day, this is the day

That the lord has made”

I thought it was ironic that here I was in a foul mood, just to realize that even if I’m in a foul mood, this day was made especially by my Lord and Savior. Psalms 118, the psalmist writes “ This is the day which the Lord has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

So I conclude with this. When you are having a “bad day” and things are not going your way and your just frustrated remember this. This day, this downright yucky day, it’s a day that God has provided. We should really rejoice and thank him for providing you with just another day to live.

I encourage you to step back and take a different look at your day when it’s turning out to be bad.

Monday afternoon I was walking across campus when I made some observations. My first observation was how nice it was outside. The sun was shining and it was a whopping 29 degrees outside. What made this afternoon much better than the others, the fact that the sun was out, and I could see clear blue sky.

Another observation I made while walking I was that campus was pretty quiet. There is a reason for this. It was only a few minutes after three in the afternoon, meaning most students were in class, or had gone home for the day.

I got to thinking, with the weather this nice, and the atmosphere this relaxing I should take advantage of it. I did jus that by spending some thinking and more importantly, some listening. I wasn’t listening to birds or squirrels, but rather listening to what God has to say.

You see part of being in a relationship with God is having a two way communication with him. It’s when we listen to what God wants; we start to see what his will for us is. All too often I tend to dominate the conversation with God, so it is nice to sit back and let him talk.

For the last week I have been a little distracted because of some events that happened with my family. In a conversation with a friend of mine, she reminded me that when you find yourself distracted and worried about something, the best cure is to grab your Bible and turn to God and his written word. That statement got me to thinking, when we pray or communicate with God, we should not let ourselves be the dominate talker, but rather be the submissive listener.

After just a few short minutes of listening to God, I felt refreshed and relaxed. It was relaxing to listen to just what God wanted to say. It felt good to just have that quiet time with God where I could focus on what he wants.

My encouragement for you is to find yourself a little quiet place and turn to scripture. While you are at that quiet place, take a moment to look around, and thank God. When you converse with God, be sure to listen, otherwise you may miss what he has planned for you. Then when you are done, see if you too feel relaxed and refreshed just from listening to what God has to say.

Ah. I get the pleasure or writing the blog the week of a nice long break! I’m sitting here in the office on Wednesday morning thinking to myself, man, this is going to be a great break! It’s going to be an awesome time to see old friends and catch up with my family. The other half of me, I think man this break may stink for this or that reason. Let me elaborate some.

You see many of my friends ‘back home’ per say are not ‘practicing’ Christians. Many of them enjoy wearing the title, or have skewed views on faith. This is an example that comes to mind when ever the topic of religion comes up among my friends and I “Well I believe in a higher being, but I don’t like the rules and formalities of church, so I like to pick what I believe.” Remember the guy in Danah’s video a couple of Wednesday nights ago that said he thought he would go to heaven because of his “good morals.” Many of my friends from home have views similar to that.

These friends just happen to be some of my closest friends I have, and I know that they figuratively “have my back”. As much as I love these guys, being with them can sometimes be difficult because they don’t understand my views on certain subjects. There’s times when my friends can challenge my faith. I find these chances an opportunity to witness to a group of people who are close to me. James 1:2-3 says: 2 Consider it all joy, my brethren, [brother] when you encounter various trials, 3knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.

I turn to this passage when I’m at home [or anywhere for that fact] and I am tempted or challenged when my friends question my views on subjects. I’m reminded by verse 3 where it says “knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” It reminds me to fall back on what I know, and turn to the God that loves me when these trials and temptations do arise.

Some of you may be feeling the same way about this subject or a similar one. I encourage you that if you are tempted over break or in life that you fall back on God. Stand firm in your actions, as Paul tells the church at Ephesus: “Finally be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power” [Ephesians 6:10]

Finally I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

A couple of weekends ago I found myself sitting in Charleston on a Saturday afternoon thinking to myself, “What should I do?” I had cleaned the apartment, done my laundry, and was finishing some homework. But I really wasn’t sure what to do with my afternoon. I knew it was nice out and I had been thinking about exploring some local parks and hiking trails. I love the outdoors and I really enjoy hiking. In fact I wish I did it more. I found myself at Fox Ridge just hiking around on some of their trails. This was early September, and I realized that very early signs of fall were starting to pop up and make themselves known to the general world. Well lets say these simple sights have just simply excited me. As I hiked some of the trails, almost 4 miles worth that afternoon, I found myself skipping along and signing tunes that reminded me of the approaching change in seasons! Ok, I really wasn’t skipping along and signing. I was just casually walking and taking in the beauty of what Fox Ridge State Park has to offer. Which if I may say so, it offers some pretty cool trails, and it’s close to campus. I’d suggest checking it out, it was really cool and well worth the short drive south.

I’m not really sure if I was bummed about the approaching change in season’s or excited. I love the outdoors, but I hate the heat and humidity that is provided during the summer. It was quite convenient that when I returned to my car the song Turn! Turn! Turn! was playing on the radio. I remember growing up listening to this song as a kid in the backseat of mom and dad’s old Buick we had. The words of this song may ring out as familiar elsewhere. Checkout the book Ecclesiastes. These same words (or similar depending on your selected translation) come from chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes. Verse 1 says - “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.”

As much I as I may miss the freedom of being able to be outdoors in the summer, or maybe miss seeing the sun that can occasionally disappear for a few days during the winter, I have to remind myself, there’s a reason for the change in season, and it all serves a purpose.

Now in all honesty I can say I’m excited about the approaching change in season. I love fall weather, and I can say that I do embrace winter, so I find myself looking forward to these two seasons approaching.

If your like me you may be looking forward to the change in season. I’m curious as to what your season is and why. Feel free to comment on the blog to tell me, or let me know next time you see me.

And if you are looking for a good tune to enjoy check out this Youtube video.

Have you ever been to some sort of event that is just massive? Last week was the start of the Worlds Greatest Aviation Celebration, as dubbed by the website. Airventure 2010, or Oshkosh is a gathering of literally thousands of airplanes and hundreds of thousands of people from literally around the world. They all in one city and all at one location during this event. Airventure is put on by a well known Aviation organization called Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA).

I had the opportunity to take a last minute trip to Airventure this last weekend. I have been before, but this time I was going solo, all by myself. I spent the two days I was there, about twelve hours a day, walking around Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh Wisconsin. I found myself looking at several thousand airplanes, checking into exhibits that were setup, and talking with fellow aviators. I love going to this event because of the mass amounts of aviation related stuff that there is on one airports property! As of Saturday morning, I had heard that there were 9,400 airplanes alone on the property and daily attendance records had been around 105,000 people a day.

What I found to be one of the best parts of being at Airventure by myself, was the solitude. I found myself getting to the airport grounds sometime around 7:15 or 7:30 both mornings. The grounds opened at 7am, but the exhibit booths and most of the airplanes for tour don’t open until 9am. Also at 7:30am, there are maybe only 5,000 people on the property, so in reference to the way it looks the rest of the day, it’s almost a ghost town.

I found this time to be a great time to think. Both Mornings I was there, I found myself sitting on the ground someplace, typically near an airplane, just taking it all in. This was a chance for me to sit and reflect on my scripture reading from the night before. I have found that reflection on scripture is a good way to help you remember scripture. I also found myself using this a time of personal worship. Now I wasn’t carrying a guitar with me,but I used worship music on my Ipod to help me with this.

On my arrival one morning I found that the weather had been bad through the night, and it was just starting to clear off. The ground was damp from the night’s rain, and the clouds were low and the smell of aircraft exhaust filled the air (probably something only a pilot would love). This particular moment I took a minute to just stop and remember the creator, the one who created everything I was looking at. The tree I was leaning on, the clouds in the sky, and the airplane in front of me. He created it all in some way or another, and yet it was simply beautiful.

Do any of you have a special time or favorite place that you like to spend time reflecting on scripture? How about a special place that reminds you of a specific piece of scripture? If so I’d like to hear about it. Let me know about it in a comment.