A piece of my heart is 3,000 miles away. (Not to mention 300 miles away, but that’s a different story ) I just got an automated email from one of the Venezuelans saying his online photo album had been updated. I couldn’t help but laugh as I browsed through photos of the guys down there goofing off, along with a handful of pictures from my time there last August.

I miss them. I miss the intensity of ministry, the genuine love they all share so openly with one another, the absolute ridiculousness of the guys having “apostle’s night” last summer, which involved dressing like goons and presenting their arguments for why they should each be appointed as “apostles” so the Book of Oddo could be added to the Bible. Their method of voting involved making a gutteral sound not unlike that of Tim the Toolman Taylor.

Seeing those pictures this morning has reminded me just how much of a blessing last summer was, and how good it will be to see them all again. Only five weeks left!

But it’s a good exhausted. So much has gone on in the last week it’s ridiculous — both schedule-wise and in the life change arena. It’s just amazing to see how God works.

Life has been so day-in and day-out for the past few months, it makes me really start to wonder why God does things the way he does. So often it seems like his hand in my life is an all-or-nothing thing. Not that God hasn’t been present through the mundane stretches of life; it’s just that much harder to see him in those times.

He has been working in my life—I can really see that now, looking back on the past year or so. I have changed in so many ways, a lot of them good, some of them maybe not so good. But I can see now how a lot of it has been by God’s leading. It’s odd, to see all those times he felt distant, he was really there, still shaping me through the trial of the mundane.

Hopefully some day I’ll learn to actually treasure those times. But until that opportunity arises again, I rejoice in the change he brings, and the countless life lessons to go with it. Here’s to the future and the unknown.

It’s movie season, and there are a lot of films worth catching right now. So hopefully this one will fly under the radar. An Inconvenient Truth — headlined by, get this: Al Gore — is in select theaters right now, toting the terrors of global warming, and how it’s going to kill us all and bury Miami and New York under 20-feet of sea water.

Someone gag me, please.

It looks like Fahrenheit 9/11 was just the beginning in this new genre of un-documentaries distorting the facts in a not-even-disguised attempt at stirring up fear and paranoia. This particular attempt is obviously a response to Michael Crichton’s latest best-seller, State of Fear, in which he lambasts the theories of global warming, and cites his sources as he does it.

Now I might as well be totally honest here: I thought the whole global warming thing was bunk before I read Crichton’s book. But after reading State of Fear, I know it is. It is almost entirely a political movement, driven by fear and environmentalist agencies.

Perhaps most enlightening to me, though, was not Crichton’s novel, but instead a speech he gave last November concerning the things he discovered when researching for his book, titled Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century. See, he set out to write a book speaking to the dangers of global warming. The problem was, the more he researched it, the more he found the evidence to be lacking, and eventually had to reverse the entire premise of his book.

If you plan on seeing this movie, you owe it to yourself to read Crichton’s article first. And don’t just buy into the hype. Al Gore will warn you: the oceans will rise 20 feet if the glaciers of the world all melt. The problem with that statement, though, is the “if”.

*edit* Here’s an article where scientists respond to Al Gore’s “circumstantial arguments.” Ha!

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore’s activism, “The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science.”