New room!

So I moved in with Tae, Eric, and Cecil for the fall, and here's my new room:

From "Knowing the Face of God"

When we speak of a personal relationship with him, we are speaking of a relationship with a personality totally different from any we can know here on earth. What I know of him can only be the tiniest fraction of his fullness. Yet what I know today is real, it is deep, and it is entirely significant, for it lays the foundation of a relationship that will last forever.

So the phrase "a personal relationship" turns out to be a good way to speak of God. Knowing God is in some ways as simple and as familiar as knowing a friend. It is also as complex, as endless, as infatuating, and as frustrating as trying to understand those we love - or even ourselves. For the more we know, the more we are called to explore farther in and higher up. And in the immense echoing splendor of God there is much more to know than we can ever comprehend.

- Tim Stafford

From "Knowing the Face of God"

Our problem is that Christ lives in us and that at the same time we wait for him to come. According to the Bible we are children of God, yet we often feel like orphans. Which perspective is the Bible speaking from, the middle or the end? Scripture, I believe, mainly presents us with a view of life from the end - "the eternal perspective," we might call it, or even "the heavenly view." This view separates what is real from what is unreal. What is real is what will last. Everything else, no matter how real it seems to us, is treated as insubstantial, hardly worth a snort. That is why Scripture can seem at times so blithely and irritatingly out of touch with reality, brushing past huge philosophical problems and personal agony. That is just how life is when you are looking from the end. Perspective changes everything. What seemed so important at the time has no significance at all.

- Tim Stafford

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography

Been trying out this new custom firmware for my Canon SD600, and also messing with HDR photography software (Photomatix to be exact). Some pics:

 

My Room (in all it's messyness)

Some very nicely cut peppers 

My street

Sponge cake, from scratch.

With a red wine berry compot, not nearly as hard as you'd think.....

From "Knowing the Face of God"

"The Bible does not automatically bring life and inspiration to everyone who reads it, any more than pictures of my wife and children automatically bring fond thoughts to anyone who looks at them. It is only when we live in a relationship to people whose images are recorded on a photograph that we can love them through it. It is only when we live in relationship to the living Jesus that we can see and hear him through the Scriptures."

-Tim Stafford

From "Knowing the Face of God"

"God gives Job, in a poetically grand manner, one instruction: Take the first three chapters of Genesis seriously. Yet this message has two sides. In content, God tells Job to shut up. In form, he rewards his noise. For God delivers the answer personally. He cares enough not to send a message but to come personally before Job's eyes. He will not - or cannot - answer Job's question the way Job wants them answered, but he will answer. Job got what every righteous man longed for: the actual presence of God."

-Tim Stafford