Giving The House A Makeover

The wife and I both have this week off and have decided to give our house a bit of a makeover. The current agenda is as follows:

• Spackle and sand a few rough spots on our walls to prepare for painting
• Paint the Kitchen Sage Green
• Paint the accent wall that connects to the vaulted ceiling in our living room maroon
• Put up ClosetMaid Shelving in the Garage for more storage
• Put up some additional ClosetMaid shelves in our closets
• Paint the back bedroom (color not decided) and make it the Office (e-Liberty Headquarters)
• Make the current office a smaller guest bedroom
• Re-Paint the baseboards in most of the house
• KILz a few spots on our ceilings
• Put a better floor and a light in our attic storage

This is definitely a hefty work load, however I plan on finishing it this week. It really reminds me of the two years I spent working for McCallum’s Custom Paint and Decorating. I was 12/13 years old at the time. Wish me luck and hopefully it will be ready to see at the next Monday night gathering.

Removing Friend Links

I have noticed recently that two links in my friends section, “BrownHosting” and “Brian’s Blog”, have been giving me errors. I am taking them down for now. Brian and Heath, if you get a site up going soon let me know and I will link you again.

My Christmas Rant

Lately I have come to the realization that I rarely use my blog as a ranting ground. After all, it is my blog and these actions are fully justified. So I dedicate this RANT to my cousin johno.

Ok, so in the last few days my wife had a very strange conversation in which she was told that many Church of Christ do not celebrate Christmas as Christ’s birth. Instead they celebrate it as a time of giving, friends, family, and even Santa. These are all good reasons for the season, however I had never heard that they didn’t celebrate Christ’s birth. I was completely surprised.

The individual that supported this gave us a few reasons. I also did a little online research and from all of this I was able to come up with 3 common reasons why SOME (not all) COC’s don’t celebrate Christ’s Birth on Christmas. They are as follows:

• Christ was not born in the winter months, he was born in the spring. We know this, as we know when Jews were to pay taxes and Mary and Joseph were going to pay taxes at the time of Jesus’ birth.
• Nowhere in the Bible are we asked, commanded or encouraged to celebrate Christ’s birth.
• December and the Solstice was a Pagan celebration and Catholics borrowed it to celebrate a special Mass or Christ-mas and as such is not a Christian activity. My church celebrates Christ’s life everyday of the year, with no day being greater than another.

So the RANT starts here.

Christ was not born in the winter months, he was born in the spring. We know this, as we know when Jews were to pay taxes and Mary and Joseph were going to pay taxes at the time of Jesus’ birth.

HAHA, so apparently you are not allowed to celebrate anything unless it is historically accurate down to the day. Assuming this stipulation is a good reason, we need to go ahead and throw out about half of the other days we celebrate over the year. After all, we are not 100% sure of the exact time of the year of many of them so there is no need to celebrate them. Historical accuracy is the trump card. Oh yeah, lets not forget about the Sabbath that you still celebrate on Sunday. In case you have forgot, Sunday is the first day of the week and God rested on the 7th. Why are you not moving your services to Saturday?? I guess it was just easier to worship on Sunday with everybody else. But Christ’s Birth??? I guess you will selectively put your foot down on that one. Moving on..

nowhere in the Bible are we asked, commanded or encouraged to celebrate Christ’s birth.

This is my favorite of the 3 points. Have you asked, commanded or encouraged anyone to celebrate your birthday lately?? You better make sure you get those requests out or WE WILL NOT CELEBRATE IT THIS YEAR!!! After all, we are not going to go above or beyond the call of duty here. I am almost sure that if Christ wanted his birthday celebrated he would have taken time out while on the Cross to let us know….right?? I am going to have to throw the Bull Crap flag on this one. Is it even necessary for me to explain how ridiculous this sounds? As a human my purpose is to Glorify God. Occasionally, I like to take time to worship him and praise his name without being asked!! What glory lies in actions that are only to fulfill orders or requests??

Lastly..

December and the Solstice was a Pagan celebration and Catholics borrowed it to celebrate a special Mass or Christ-mas and as such is not a Christian activity. My church celebrates Christ’s life everyday of the year, with no day being greater than another.

This is almost as good as the last one. So basically they are saying that Catholics decided to create a Christian celebration during a very popular Pagan celebration. Wow!! That sounds like a really bad idea. UMM NO! That sounds like a great idea and a great evangelism tool. Why do so many churches have activities on Halloween?? You think this might be for the same reason?

On top of this, you’re saying that Catholics “borrowed” it. I ask you, are you still celebrating Christmas? Oh yeah, that’s right you are. I guess you “borrowed” it from the Catholics to celebrate giving, friends, family and even Santa. You also improved it by removing that horrible tradition of celebrating Christ’s birth. And all because you “celebrate Christ’s life everyday of the year, with no day being greater than another.” This is a decent policy I have to say. So in support of this belief they don’t celebrate Easter either right?? Oh wait, They DO!!

I would not have made this post if they would show their true beliefs by not celebrating Christmas. Instead they choose to celebrate it by making it very clear that Christ’s Birth is not the reason.

I wish you all a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS from the bottom of my Christ’s Birthday Celebrating Heart!! Jesus didn’t ask for it, but he is sure going to get it. I guess we will call this Birthday Celebration a Surprise and maybe he will forgive us for not getting the day perfect. Afterall, he is in the forgiving business.

A Brief Update

As many of you have probably noticed, it has been a while since I have updated the blog. So I decided to drop in on it for a little while to implement a new style, xhtml validation once again, and this post. Over the past few months I have been a busy man to say the least.

• Did a complete site redesign on e-Liberty.org. We are getting ready to bring it out of its dorment stage in the near future.
• Co-Authored an Identity Protection Suite with Craig that will be available free on e-Liberty.org in the near future. It is aproximately 7000 lines of code (server side and client side combined).
• Learned a great deal of PHP
• Just finished my last homework assignment of my undergraduate life an hour ago.

I am sure there are a few more things that probably need to be mentioned, but my brain is currently mush.