Sunday night and all is quiet

It's 8:22 pm and Cole and Cade just finished saying good night to me while I was ironing my shirts for the week and listening to a podcast by Timothy Keller about the Holy Spirit. Today was a relatively uneventful day. We went to church (First Alliance) and Ceili ended up joining mom and I in the adult service as she wouldn't stop crying in her class. We got home and she had to spend the afternoon in her room - she was not happy. I have been on a pretty fantastic journey since 2007 when I made the conscious decision to pursue my faith in spite of having used many excuses not to. As of late I have spent considerable time listening to debates between atheists and Christians as well as getting myself neck deep into theology. It has been said that you get your picture of God based on your image of your earthly father. My father (your Gramps) is a tough man who has lived a tough life. As such my own vision of God was one of him being someone sitting up there somewhere waiting to catch me in all of my wrongdoings. Over the past 2 years I have come to have my image of God adjusted to realize He is not who I have imagined Him to be. He created me to enjoy me and my life should bring Him glory. Today in church I was struck by a pretty significant thought: we are changed by how we respond to His resolve. I think many people, including myself, get this backwards. We resolve to be better people, make more money, be better spouses, friends and members of our community and then wait for God's response. It occurred to me this morning that maybe God resolves to have His kingdom here on earth and we are changed (sanctified) by how we respond to the reality around us. The first commandment is to love The Lord your God with all your heart and the second is to love your neighbour as yourself. This is done through serving. So it would follow that our response to the reality around us should be to ask "how can I help?" and let God work through us as we undertake the opportunities available to us. I wanted to make sure I capture that thought and passed it along. It has become so obvious to me that we are all broken people incapable of anything good unless God directs us. The idea that our response to His resolve is the correct order of things (compared to us waiting for God to respond to our resolve) has found a place in my theology. I struggle most with figuring out how to serve all of my children. I get annoyed when I should be patient (especially with Cade who unfairly gets the hardest time from me) and I don't seek opportunities to serve all you kiddos. I can serve your mom pretty easy but mostly because I feel like she bears an unequal amount of the workload in our family and home. I wish I could serve her because I want to and not because I feel guilty. This is going to be a busy week as I work to convert over a tonne of code for mlenow.ca and hopefully launch the new website this Friday. I hope you all have a great week and I resolve (lol) to be more responsive to the opportunities God places in front of me. Stay tuned to see how it goes.