For the longest time I thought it was just like google maps, but then I found out that I can change the angle of the camera and see mountains! Mt Shasta is really impressive. Oh, and there is a flight sim built in. Yeah, you heard me, a flight sim.

Anyway, today I got a copy of a cd that my picture is on. So I now have three CD credits to my name.

Goals for this next year:

1.  Go to Bora Bora.
2.  Go back to China.
3.  Lose 20lbs.
4.  Go to the gym on a regular basis.
5.  Become debt free.

I stared at him, my friend’s little brother, someone who is now making me feel old. He is having a kid. I remember when he was just some skater kid who was sixteen and annoying. Now he is one of my friends, as big as me, married, and having a child in six months. I felt old.

I finished “A Brave New World.” It wasn’t as epic as “1984,” but it is good in it’s own right. It spoke to me about forgiveness and bitterness. You should read it.

Life has been going on, and on is going life. I’m not stuck, but I am not flying around. I am moving this thing called life, like carrying a medicine ball on a hike. It isn’t hard, but I do have to make a conscience decision to keep it moving towards my goals. One of them is to write down my goals. I should do that now.

So, what are your goals that you want to accomplish in a year from now?

I was beginning a trip of a life time. And looking back, it was.

There were a lot of things about that trip that were hard. And the biggest was the people that I was with. I had no peers, or friends on this trip, and that was just hard. Joleen was fun at times, but she wasn’t my friend. Luke was crazy, but he and I only got a long about half the time. Happy and I butted heads, and didn’t respect eachother, I felt like I was being babysat by Tom and Yolanda. The diner wasn’t work that I wanted to do, and I had a lot of growing to do.

But there are things that I remember, that make me miss that trip. Pestering the interns and learning how to read chinese – entrance, exit, adult, giant, little, heart, golden. Making friends with people that I still miss – Jessica, Diana, Angie, Fiona and her kids.

I miss being out and being on my own there – picking up the passport pictures, riding the bike with Luke to the Jom-bai, seeing where the sidewalk ends, riding back from the university alone on a bus full of chinese, taking pictures outside in the dark. I miss going shopping at the Jom-bai, the bus rides to see the sites, daily taxi rides, buying a bike with no translator.

I miss the food. The strange diet of chinese for breakfast – Chicken intestines, wonderful noodles, steamed buns, baconian, and other things that I loved.
The strange diet of lunch and dinner at the diner – a mixture of hamburgers and hawaiian food, with chinese ingredients. Cause nothing was the same there – the beef is too lean so you have to mix pork in with it, and other little things.

I miss the connection I had back home due to the fact that these people where from the same island as my good friend.

I miss the things we did – some how finding shopping carts and carrying both our bikes and two giant benches over a mile of ups and downs and sides. I miss the fact that I cut down a tree with a meat cleaver because there are apparently neither axes nor shovels in china.

I miss the writing. I miss the sadness and homesickness and the tiredness that I wrote from and how it made me write. I had some of my best writing there – telling of my emotions, the customs, and just my day to a broad audience that was interested to hear what I was saying.

I miss the time I had with God there. I miss that for once in my life I was having dreams of things that were going on, because there was nothing there to hinder me and His time. I miss that I was walking and claiming land in my footsteps. I miss reading my bible, and listening to Misty Edwards while I did exercising in the mornings. I miss the purpose that was in my life at that point.

I just miss China.

This is where you should go if you want to read my travel blog: caldar.wordpress.com

Are we predestined to do what we do? Are there only a select few that shall be saved?

Are we in complete control of our circumstances? Able to be stronger and smarter than God himself?

I am not sure.

If there is a select few, what is the point of sharing you faith? Everyone who is going to be saved is going to be saved. If I don’t do it, someone else will; am I going to stop God? Can one man change God’s plan? And that means that there are some out there that are not chosen to be saved. Who can’t be saved? It does say in the Bible that He has chosen us before the foundation of the world and that we are predestined to be adopted into His family (Eph. 1:4-5).

Then again, if we are not a predestined group of people saved, and I don’t share with anyone about the saving grace of Jesus’ blood, I have basically kept salvation from them. It says in the bible that when a watchman on the wall sees the enemy coming and does not sound the alarm and wakes the city – the blood of the whole city is on his hands (Ezekiel 33:1-6).

So, where does that leave us?

I read a quote in a book that said this:
“There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.” Either way, nothing happens.”

Being guilted into proselytize is wrong, and that isn’t my point. My point is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that you were saved since before you were born or that you made the choice on that sunday after the sermon. You are saved – and we don’t need to know if the guy on the bus is on God’s “master list of the saved” or if he is not. It doesn’t matter if it is all on you to lead him to Christ.

The truth that action is still required.

I am not saying that you need to go out and talk to everyone. I am saying that action is required. Do whatever feels right with you and Christ, but do something.