i am joining the group of nerds now. I am a huge fan of comics that make jokes about video games i grew up on. HA. well, I am enjoying it. Old video games and calvin and hobbes are some of the highest joys in my life. Mario was my father. so, i mean, what do you expect?

Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I’ll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.

The concept of an ebenezer is one i love, since it is such an amazing testament of God's faithfulness. Basically when samuel made a stone pile and named it ebenezer using the rocks at a reminder of God's faithfulness, that is great to me. My tattoos are ebenezers, since they are constant reminders of how far God has carried me and they contain stories of God's faithfulness in them. I just want to take a little time and write about some of the oddity and how god has been faithful in my trip to PA. To start, the only reason i got to come up to PA was because my boss at the coffee shop i worked at fired me the day before i got asked to be a wilderness camp counselor on a mountain in PA. Which is funny, since i had been praying that God would open up a way for me to travel north, since i had never been north.

Another area, i have been asking god to open up doors to get a motorcycle. well, the model of motorcycle i wanted was on ebay, almost brand new, and the auction ended since it was a hundred dollars out of my price range. my roomies and i prayed that if we were meant to buy the motorcycle we would be able to buy it outside of Ebay for 1100 dollars. that is the exact amount the man offered the bike to us for when i emailed him.

When i finally got to the camp i was working at i was pretty apathetic and focused on myself, since i was ready to be home, start looking for a job for the school year, get back to my home church, and my community. I wanted all these things for my own comfort in spite of i was hired to be a guide to christ to these kids. I wasn't trying to dig into the kids, get to know them, mentor them, anything. In the end, that didn't matter since God worked through me even when i was trying to work. After two days kids issues starting flooding to the surface, fights, heart breaking home stories, and pleas for God's grace all were happening around us. Every single kid we had, all 18 highschoolers, either asked for better understanding of who God is and what he has done for us or accepted Jesus as their lord and savior. All the staff broke down at atleast one point and our issues were flooding to the surface again.

in the process of leaving the ranch to head to Sam's house to pack it up, which is six hours away, a tire blew out and it was a new tire. And another new tire had a defective sidewall and was rippling. So, after a day of looking for tires, since everything was closed on sunday, we found a mechanic who said we had to buy five tires from him and a rim to get anything. The day before a guy handed sam and i sixty dollars to help out with gas, well, the mechanic asked for sixty dollars for the tires. sam and i were changing the tires on the rims, which is an ordeal when you only know half of the process. After thirty minutes of struggling in the shop, randomly an old friend of sam walks in and he worked in a tire shop for a few years. He just decided to walk in the shop to see if anyone was in there, even though it was closed.

Sam and i have a twenty hour drive tomorrow to get back to mississippi and we have two vehicles, since we are bringing sams truck down to jackson. We looked into getting a car dolly and it was going to cost $260 to get the dolly. that is double the cost of gas in my car to drive down. we decided to go into the uhaul store and just see if they could work anything out. before going in i said the max i could pay would be $140, ten dollars more than my original cost in gas. We go into the store, explain to the guy we want to get a dolly, but financially it didn't make sense to get a dolly that cost more than our gas. the guy looks at us and says, " how does $140 sound?" sam and i nearly screamed, since now we can tag team drive and not have to stop for rest the whole way down to mississippi.

also, I got a call back from an online application i submitted to a coffee company in jackson. The owner just happened to want to schedule an interview with me the day after i get back to town, knows my roommate, and a good friend of mine from church is one of his managers. so, we will see what will happen with the job, but everything in the past few weeks has been orchestrated to force me to see God's hand in my life. There really isn't any way around it, i am not in control of my life, but someone who plans things a lot better than i can is and God really does have my best interests in mind, even though loosing my job, tires blowing, getting stranded, all those things did not seem like they were good and in reality weren't great to happen, but there is a bigger plan in mind. God is faithful, and here i raise my ebenezers with gratitude, since God is faithful. these are only some of the things that happened. there are more, but i am long winded in this. so, with this i end:

" it is for freedom that christ has set us free. stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be yourselves be burdened again by a yolk of slavery" galatains 5:1