Flyboy Files

I've Moved!!

2007-07-02T13:15:00.001-07:00

Yes, the rumors are true: Flyboy Files has moved. In favor of the rad blogging tools over at wordpress.com, I've decided to move my oh-so-active blog over there. :-)

You can find my new home at: Flyboyfiles.wordpress.com

Thanks for reading over here and follow me over in that direction.

See you there! :-D

Save me.

2007-05-23T15:43:00.000-07:00

Lord,

Save me from myself. Save me from my brokenness. Remind me why I want to be your man, your warrior, your peacemaker, your teacher. Remind me why I want to remain pure.

Father, I love you with all my heart, but I'm just struggling to stay motivated right now. Rejuvenate my spirit and pour into me so that I may continue to pour out. You are my God, my King, and my Savior. I am nothing without you. You are my Lord and you give me worth. You love me and nothing else matters. Cleanse my heart, oh God. Make it pure as snow.

Thank you, Lord for saving me. Thank you, Lord for your grace, love, and forgiveness. Thank you Father for making me complete. I love you and I always will. Dad, there is so much more that my heart wants to say but that my mind can't express through words, though this worship song comes close:

Refiner's Fire
by Brian Doerksen
©1990 Vineyard Songs Canada

Purify my heart
Let me be as gold and precious silver
Purify my heart
Let me be as gold, pure gold

Chorus:
Refiner's fire
My heart's one desire
Is to be holy
Set apart for You Lord
I choose to be holy
Set apart for You my master
Ready to do your will.

Purify my heart
Cleanse me from within and make me holy
Purify my heart
Cleanse me from my sin deep within

Chorus (x2)

I love you Daddy.

Praise be to your name,
Blake

God's love is so much bigger than our depravity

2007-04-05T17:02:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been following the sad story of Mary Smith, the southern baptist minister's wife who disappeared from a Christian Women's conference in Louisiana. This tale began as one about a woman who simply vanished (apparently into thin-air) when she left her seat to visit the concessions stand and never returned. The police have ruled out her husband the minister as a suspect and are still looking for her. However, today it seems that this story has taken a rather spiritually tragic turn: She may have left of her own accord to deal with some of her own demons.

According to the FoxNews story:.

Detectives learned that Mary Smith was about to lose her job for failing a drug test...

And:

Halphen also said that the woman had told colleagues that she was divorced and was a bad role model for her children, aged 7 and 10.

If that hypothosis is true and shed did run away to deal with her own demons, it may not seem so bad to the secular world. It may sound like a woman who wants her life together before she can continue being a mom and a wife. To me however, it just sounds tragic. Why? Because God's love is so much bigger than all that stuff. His love is bigger than her drug test failure. His love is bigger than her view of herself as a bad roll model. His love washed all of that away a long time ago. The tragedy is that she hasn't seen or accepted that cleansing and felt that the only way out was to run from it all.

This whole thing just breaks my heart into so many pieces. As I've been working through so much of my own depravity and brokenness lately, God has continued to impress upon me that "I'm His boy." I'm His son, His warrior, His child. I'm His man. With Him, I'm literally whiter and more pure than snow. All too often when we sin and fall we feel like we have to start over again; or as a good friend of mine put it during our accountability group a few weeks ago:

It's like we're playing catch with God, throwing the baseball back and forth, counting each successful volley. We may even get as high as 300 catches. Inevitably though, we all occasionally drop the ball. When that happens, we all have a tendency to start counting all over again. The beauty of forgiveness and God's love is that He doesn't see it that way. After we say "1" following the first throw He replies, "No. That's 301."

Isn't that analogy awesome? When I first heard it I was just drilled with this incredible sense of freedom, humility and the truth of that statement. Mary Smith needs to hear it. She needs to know that no matter what, God never resets the catch-counter. Her depravity is covered over by grace and forgiveness is just waiting for her to come along and take it. She is God's princess and valued more highly than all the Gold in the world.

Mary, let our Lord take your burden. Let Him heal you. Come back to your family and let Him make you whole. Godspeed sister.

Okay... Now I'm Excited!!

2007-04-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know I shouldn't be spending company time playing with my blog... but MAN!!! Now I'm getting really excited about this blogging stuff. I've had this one for a few years but as you can see, I haven't really done anything with it until the past two days.

What got me so excited you may ask? GIMP. Why Gimp? Because this awesome open-source image-editing application allowed me to accidentally create the rad color-scheme in that image you see at the heading of my blog. How cool is that?

Here's the original:

And here's what I turned it into:

Isn't that rad? Okay... enough of this kiddish excitement. I've got work to do and a presentation for our company all-customer conference to create. Toodles!

Lock & Load!! (Here we go again...)

2007-04-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

[Edit From 6/29/2007: Well, given that two months have passed and we haven't attacked Iran yet, I'd say that either the article I based this on was wrong or our government saw the intelligence leak and decided to pretend like they never had this plan in the first place. I'm kind of embarrassed about this post, actually. It makes me look like some conspiracy weirdo when I'm totally not, though my readers (all one and a half of you) don't know this because they haven't met me. I've decided to leave this post in place if for no other reason than to remind me of where I've been. Thanks for understanding that I'm no conspiracy weirdo. ;-) Have a pleasant weekend.]

Today a friend sent me a rather disturbing email as a follow-up to a conversation the two of us had back in January with regards to the potential for a war with Iran.

To give you some background, a friend of his is a former WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) adviser to President George W. Bush's cabinet and was privy to the top secret information proving the existence of WMD's in Iraq prior to the invasion (He insists that the weapons were there... maybe not in a complete weapons form, but they most definitely were in production within mobile truck-based labs... anyhow I digress). I say this because the dude is a genius and really knows what he's talking about. Anyhow, that friend now lives down in the Louisiana bayou noticed a few months back that our military had begun to refill their tactical fuel reserves. These reserves give our military machine the capability to operate free from domestic fuel supply constraints for 6 months.

Given the global political climate at the time, and his deeper knowledge of the US.-Iran tensions, he was pretty confident that we'd be at war with Iran in 3 months. Well, that three months has come and frighteningly it appears that he was right. Our government has plans to launch a surprise attack on Iran this coming Friday with the end goal of crippling their military and setting their nuclear weapons research back by several years. Russian Intelligence got wind of the planned attack and has released some details to the public. Apparently this whole issue is really big news in Europe but has largely been ignored by media on our side of the water.

The problem with this is that an attack of this nature, without congressional approval, is illegal and unconstitutional. Iraq war comparisons and analogies aside, this is one war that we cannot afford to have happen. Very few countries (if any) have won a two-front war--and we're about to open a third. If this does in fact go down, I for one, for the first time, will find myself among the war protesters downtown. We must not go to war with Iran without congressional approval--at least until we're done in Iraq and Afghanistan. ;-) Stand up and resist this war. (Wow, I sound like a hippie... boy... we'll have to fix that)

First Post Ever

2005-04-10T19:51:00.000-07:00

Hey! This is my first ever post on this blog! Hope you like!