Chronicles of Marnia

For a few years, Dane and I had the privilege of being Sunday School teachers and youth workers for a group of remarkable young men and women. We had the pleasure of teaching a young man named Tim...

Tim is one of the most insightful and authentic Christ followers I know and I'm honored if I have a miniscule amount to do with that since God let me have Tim to teach for a while. Tim comes to our house and we will sit at our kitchen table for hours discussing the infinite character of God and how He is moving in our lives. Tim jokingly refers to our time together as "Oracle". It is during Oracle I've learned even more about God because Tim shares with me his personal encounters with God...and the student becomes the teacher. Today, Tim blogged on a weighty subject concerning God, and his blog was so beautifully crafted, I had to share...

call me crazy, but i always wondered why jesus had to die. i mean, maybe there was a class or something like that for the rest of you, but to me it always seemed quite confusing why god couldn't have come up with another way out. i mean, he's god, and he's all powerful, so atleast in my mind it stands to reason that he should be able to find another way.but maybe not...so, if you live in texas, i'm pretty sure we're all in agreement that the end of the world is upon us. a week of straight drenching down to the bone rain at the end of june? what is this world coming to. i'm working this awesome job this summer being a manny to a couple of trouble making junior high boys. i get paid to play video games and swim.[hey, it's not all fun and games]but part of that means taking them where they need to go.

and for this week atleast, it's been taking the older one to football camp in midlothian each day. so i'm sitting outside of the football field in the car waiting for him, reading up on a great new book by steven james called story [really, i highly recommend it to some of you avid readers out there]and i gotta say, i was getting a little irritated, because the kid is like ten minutes late and his brother is complaining, and i'm wondering why he's not just coming on out. did i mention it was raining then too? and then, all at once, in some blinding revelation of truth, it hits me!that is why jesus had to die!

so i finally get out of the car and go up to the gym, and there he is standing at the door just chilling and waiting for me to get there so that he can go home and we can play some more video games. now, let me explain...i was there the whole time waiting on him. he was there the whole time waiting on me. we were both just stuck, waiting on the other one. but to him, i was like a row down hidden behind other cars, and to make matters worse, it was raining. should he step out of the safety of the gym and look for my car, he would have found it only a few down and we could have left, but he had no guarantee of that. and so he resolved himself to sit there and wait. it wasn't until i myself got up and braved the drenching rain, showed him that i was indeed there and showed him the way back to safety, leading him to the car that either of us could go anywhere.

that is why jesus had to die.god was waiting. israel was waiting. they were both waiting on each other. but god needed to do something to show them that he was safe, that he loved and valued them - something that would spell a dramatic departure from the god of justice they had known before. so what did he do? he sent the very best that he had...his own son, god with skin on, imago dei...and he sent him to show them the way. he had to show them that he was safe, that he knew the way, and that he was committed to loving them...and what better way to do that than to take the hardest route imaginable, death on a cross, to show them that he was serious. to show them that the hard part was over, and that he, god himself, had taken the bullet of reconciliation. the hard part was over, and now it was about a god of grace.me stepping out of my car and braving the rain to show a kid the way home helped me to understand a god stepping out of his glory to show mankind the way home...through an empty tomb.

"death swallowed up by triumphant life! who got the last word, oh, death? oh, death, who's afraid of you now? it was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. but now in a single victorious stroke of life, all three - sin, guilt, death - are gone, the gift of our master, jesus christ. thank god!"1 corinthians 15:54-57

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Happy Father's Day to you dad's out there. Dane was a little sad on Father's Day because Lindsay wasn't home to celebrate with us, but she did call him from Spain to tell him she loved and missed him, so that was a great gift for him.

Dane got a new gas grill for Father's Day. It's got all the bells and whistles and he can't wait to use it...but it keeps raining and he hasn't been able to yet. I think all this unseasonable rain we're getting is God's way of promoting the new movie "Evan Almighty" but that's just a guess! ;) I can't wait to see that one. I laughed all the way through "Bruce Almighty" so I hope this one is as funny.

Sunday was an interesting day. We went to our old church for Sunday service. One of our kids from our previous college and youth ministry is leaving after having served as interim Music Minister and they were having a farewell ceremony for him. It was great to see old friends and see how big the kids there are getting. I was slightly dreading the day, but God is good and there was not one moment of awkwardness or any other negative emotion :)

I've been teaching computers a few nights a week at our counties Christian Women's Job Corps. There are 8 ladies attending classes and it's so wonderful to see how they are growing and learning. It's such a great ministry and I'm awed to see how God moves within it.

Youth camp is coming next month! We are really getting pumped. Dane and I didn't get to go to Youth camp last summer and we really missed it. This year, the encounter youth group (Momentum) is going to Camp Copas in Denton. It has great facilities and the musical group coming is Grits...WOO HOO! You ain't heard good rap until you've heard Grits. The kids are all excited and I can't wait to spend the week with them and getting to know a few of them better. I love that God lets me work with teens. It's my favorite of ways to serve Him.

Okie dokie, I'm off to work on the website I'm trying to build. Have a great week :)

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As of 10:30 this morning, FedEx dropped off Lindsay's completed passport! The stupid thing had been done since Monday, but nobody "overnighted" it until yesterday. Thankfully our state rep's office dropped an email to the Houston passport agency and they finally mailed it. So it looks like Lindsay will be jetting off to Europe after all. One more crisis diverted.

Now what are going to do about Paris Hilton? I for one am going to call my Congressman again and see if he can't right that wrong ;) Just jokes folks. Have a great weekend. Thanks for checking in. I'll be posting Lindsay's travel pics soon.

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Okay, so I think we have the passport drama under control, but we still don't have the passport. We are t-minus 6 days until Lindsay leaves, but I won't cave to the panic (God and I have been working SO hard on patience and calm). If what we did Friday to appease the passport morons in Houston worked, Lindsay should have it by today or tomorrow. We'll see (note the cheery, positive sound of my voice!)

We are finally about to be out of school. I know, those of you who've been out a week or so now can't believe we're still in, but yes we are. Lindsay gets out tomorrow and Peyton is done by Thursday. Lindsay racked up some serious TAKS scores this year so she's exempt from her finals (get it girl!) so tomorrow she's kicking back for a few classes she has to attend and then she's heading out for a sleepover with her friends Brianna and Hollie. This is no ordinary sleepover though...this one is just the girls...with no parents around. And let me tell you, they feel SO grownup! Before you think I've lost my mind, Brianna and Hollie are my pastor's daughters and the two sweetest souls on this earth. They and Lindsay are quite trustworthy, so all the parents involved have agreed to this arrangement. The grandparents live a few streets away and may make a suprise inspection ;) but the girls are excited we are showing them the trust to hang out unsupervised.

Peyton should be done with softball, but we keep getting rained out. Now the makeup games are getting rained out! She might play tonight but the fields are still pretty wet, so we'll see! She's also very excited about her birthday next month and going to camp shortly after that.

I've been keeping busy with some new things. I started Weight Watchers. It rocks! I'm doing the online version because you can just pop in what you eat on the website and it tracks your points for you so you don't blow it :) It's so simple and after one week, I've already lost 4 pounds! Dane and the girls by default have been doing it with me since I'm doing all the meal preps. Dane has lost 8 pounds. I want to smack him, but instead I've opted to compete with him. Now we're seeing who can hit their goal weight first. The way I figure it, it's win/win. We've decided we want to go back to our college weights--Not coincidentally, that's when we were both hotties and started dating ;)--but that was a looooong time ago, so we'll see if we can eat and exercise ourselves back to those bodies again.

I'm also starting to teach computer classes for Ellis County Christian Women's Job Corps. It's such a great program. It's a year round program in 3 month sessions that helps low-income women acquire skills to help them get good jobs. The program will also help them get their GED, teach them parenting skills, home ec skills and matches them with a mentor to support and cheer them on throughout the entire process. Their motto is "It's a hand up, not a hand out". It's a useful program to help women, but most importantly, it's a ministry. The 18 months this program has existed in Ellis County, dozens of women have come to know Christ! I'm super excited about helping out and watching God change the lives of these sweet women.

That's it for now. I gotta go make some brochures for an upcoming retreat. Have a great week!

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My sister took a great job in Florence Italy early this year. Now that summer is upon us, we have the wonderful opportunity to send Lindsay to see her for about a month. How exciting--that is until the government in all their wisdom decided this year that you literally need a passport to leave the country (unless you are driving or on a cruise). So...the national passport agency is OVERWHELMED with passport applications coming through.

I've begun to see the US government like the City of Midlothian. Midlothian builds large subdivisions around what can, at best, be considered po-dunk back roads. Then suddenly you have 1000 families using a rundown 2 lane road to get out of their neighborhoods and traffic becomes a real headache. Sensing the trainwreck that's coming, the city leaders THEN decide, "Hey, we should build roads to handle the new influx of traffic we've created". The US government knew they were going to increase passport applications by declaring a law that states everyone who flies out of the US has to have a passport and when the crush of applications started pouring in, THEN they decided perhaps it was time to hire temp employees to handle the problem. They didn't however, elect to spend too much time training the new help because we are now in passport hell, and it is all thanks to a group of people who were thrown into a job without timely and proper instructions. Your tax dollars at work my friends!

As of this writing, we are hoping to get an appointment to the Houston office (where all Texas passports are shipped from) to pick up Lindsay's passport because she gets on a plane in 10 days and STILL has no passport. Did I mention the $1300 non-refundable plane ticket yet? Silly me. Maybe it's because I've been up until 1 am for the last 3 nights trying to talk to the passport agents since their phone banks are so jammed during the day, they simply hang up on you--and I'm a little tired and forgetful.

To our credit, we applied for Lindsay's passport in early April. We paid for the expedited process as well as paying to have the passport application overnighted to Houston and then overnighted back to us upon completion. Every government employee I talked to in this process assured me it would be between 10 and 21 days until Lindsay got her completed passport. We are day 49, but who's counting? The problem is so stupid, I can't even fathom how sane people are seriously using it to withold Lindsay's passport from her. The problem is that Lindsay is a minor and needed Dane and I present when she applied for the passport to verify her signature and that she has our permission to apply for a passport. All 3 of us went to the post office with all the proper documentation, applications and the $198 it costs for all the expedited things we asked for. The postal employee verified the documentation, made copies for their branch, witnessed our signatures, mailed it all off and we thought all was fine.

Then the letter came...

In a nutshell, the letter says that since Lindsay is over the age of 14, we shouldn't have signed her application. The postal employee told us to, so we did. Lindsay also signed it as she should have. So, her passport is complete and sitting in Houston, but they won't let us have it because TOO MANY SIGNATURES APPEAR ON HER APPLICATION. So I'm on the phone in the middle of the night saying, "can you just white out mine and Dane's signatures, I mean seriously!" But no. She has to fill out a new application, sign it, overnight it and then the passport hostage will be released. 3 days ago, that was a simple fix to a stupid problem. Today, we are being told we have to provide ANOTHER passport photo, ANOTHER application and ANOTHER original birth certificate and then overnight the whole mess to Houston. And then when Houston has time, they'll update their mainframe and the passport will be mailed out. Here's the kicker. Houston doesn't like to do corrections unless you have an in-person appointment. The soonest Houston will give us an appointment is June 15. Lindsay's flight is on June 11.

Our state rep Chet Edwards is now involved. I honestly can't recall if I voted for him last election, but I will next time for his heroic efforts to help us out.

Thanks for letting me vent. I'll post the climactic ending to our saga when I know more.

PS--Start applying for your passport now. They're good for 10 years so 4 or 5 years from now when you take your dream vacation, your passport might actually be processed.

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