Thursday, October 22, 2009

Footsteps in the Sand

Today I was driving home in my car and I was listening to Relient K in my car and it got to the last song of the album… And the song is called Deathbed. It’s a fantastic song in my opinion… and it’s about a guy who’s life couldn’t have possibly gone more wrong… A life that is truly pathetic and pitiful… yet its a life you see so commonly around society… His father left his mother when he was 8, he gets addicted to alcohol and smoking at 14, gets married at 21 after getting his girlfriend accident, his relationship with his wife is very tense and unloving, he ends up getting divorced and the wife takes custody of the children and he ends up spending his days drowning his sorrows with whiskey and trying to distract himself by playing bowls. He eventually contracts lung cancer from his years of hardcore smoking and his lying on his deathbed. He reflects on how hopeless his life was… How sad and miserable it was… but as he was dying he remembers that at one point in his life he had accepted Jesus Christ as his saviour. And he clings to the hope of going to heaven because of it… and surely enough, as he dies, Jesus appears before him and takes him up to heaven with Him because of his faith. and the song ends with the famous lines from John 14:6 but slightly modified for the song “I am the way, follow me and take my hand. And I am the truth, embrace me and you’ll understand. And I am the life, and through me you’ll live again. For I am Love” … John 14:6 is “I am the way and the truth and the life. Noone comes to the father [In Heaven] except through me.”

It also reminded me of a poem named “Footsteps in the Sand” and it goes like this.

“One night a man had a dream.
He dreamed he was walking along
the beach with the Lord.

Across the dark sky flashed scenes from his life.
For each scene, he noticed
two sets of footprints in the sand,
one belonging to him and the other to the Lord.

When the last scene of his life flashed before him,
he looked back at the footprints in the sand.
He noticed that many times along the path of his life
there was only one set of footprints.
He also noticed that it happened at the
very lowest and saddest times in his life.
This bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it.

"Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you,
you'd walk with me all the way.
But I have noticed that during the most
troublesome times in my life there is
only one set of footprints.
I don't understand why when I needed you most
you would leave me."

The Lord replied "My precious, precious child,
I love you and would never leave you.
During your times of trial and suffering,
when you see only one set of footprints in the sand,
it was then that I carried you."

image

Now you might be wondering how these two even relate to each other… So I will explain myself.

Like the song I see that so many people have seen so much pain and suffering in their lives, with no direction and no hope or reason to live… and it’s very disheartening really. Life is like an obstacle course, and a very difficult one at that. and Jesus is always near us whether we believe in Him or not, whether we trust Him or not. He has already gone through the obstacle course of life as a human 2000 years ago and he passed with FLYING colours because He is God and He came down here to save us from ourselves. He wants to help us through life. And when we hit the part of the obstacle course where you have to cross the Grand Canyon on a tight rope, we struggle and we are clinging to the rope by the tips of our sweaty hands, Jesus is standing next to us with arms reached out waiting for us to reach out to Him so that He can carry us through to the end of the course. All we have to do is TRUST that Jesus can do it… Because we know we can’t do it ourselves… So you have nothing to lose.

image The picture above is of Charles Blondin. A legendary tightrope walker… He is carrying his manager on his back as he is walking across the top of Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Life will push you into these hard times, imagine crossing the falls by yourself… I know I’d be crapping my pants, almost paralysed with fear… But like the image above, Jesus can carry you across… and although it would still be scary as hell, I know I trust Jesus to carry me through life more than I’d ever trust Charles Blondin to carry me over the Niagara Falls.

But yeah… That’s my interesting sharing for today…

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

All-Nighter’s so far…

Well, I thought I would start a new… “tradition” so to speak… and that is to take a sunrise photo each time I do an all-nighter. I’ve done that in the past, but from now on, I will try to take a photo of the sunrise every time haha… with my phone or with my camera, which ever is available… So I guess today I have claims to 2 all-nighters this semester already….

The first one was at uni… 5th of October…. and the second one was at home 16th of October… yeah… lol archi sucks like that…

neways here are the photos
the first two are from my phone… 5am… at uni by the lakes… and the last one is from my room’s eastward window… 5am also. lol…

5-10-09 5-10-09 (2)

16-10-09

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Adrenaline + Shooting Games

Now those of you who know me would know that I am a big fan of those console shooting games like Time Crisis and the like where I have a gun in my hand rather than a mouse and keyboard… I own every Time Crisis game ever made except for the first one, I think I have project titans somewhere tho which was the expansion to the first game… But yeah… I have pretty darn good accuracy even if I do say so myself… in TC 3 I have over 85% accuracy and I do headshots like 70% of the time… so I am fairly good… Although the dodging still gets me at times so I still need like 2-3 continues to get to the end of the game… which is sad…

Neways today a bunch of us went to a friend’s place and they had a Wii, and we started off playing ghost squad… Being a Wii the aiming was crap as crap can get… but the crosshair was on the screen so you could kinda just swing the gun around by the hip and aim on the screen. Neways I was absolutely owning them at the game… I’d shoot 3 of the enemies before they fire and kill one opponents sometimes… This is a typical shooting game, about terrorists, big deal right? its not scary or anything…. and I had about a 30-50% score lead on the other player

But we got bored of it, so we played House of the Dead: Overkill…. Now the crappy aiming system transfers cos its still a Wii and it still sucks… But of course its meant to be a horror game right? Well, it wasn’t really that scary or anything… its just zombies and you blast them to pieces. Well my friend, she suddenly just started to play like crazy… I was playing as normal… 50-70% headshots… but she had like a 30% score lead on me… I had less shots fired, more kills, more headshots and a bigger combo/consecutive kills but I was way behind on the scoreboard… I didn’t understand why…

But somehow I think adrenaline must have a big deal to do with it… a shooting game is a shooting game… but the content was farrrr different. The fact that I played as I would normally play and she went nuts and went insanely trigger happy probably indicates she had alot more adrenaline and also she got 80% of the bonus items on the stage and health packs so I probably died a few more times than I should’ve… so that probably explains my score but yeah… It wasn’t expected… at all lol…

Adrenaline does crazy things… Adrenaline is good… Anyways that is all :P

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Skirmish!!!

Hmmm… First time using this… Windows Live writer thing for blogs…. We’ll see how it goes…

Neways, yeah went to skirmish today… and as always, I tend to cause more injury to myself than the paintballs could injure me… Not that I’m a retard mind you… Both my knees are fully bruised from sliding and diving onto them for 3 hours of skirmish… and also I have scratched all up my arms from sliding around… annnddd I have a massive graze on my hand from one bad dive… lol… and I also managed to rip several holes through their overalls around the knee area from all the sliding around but nyeah… lol…

I guess next time I just need to wear gloves and perhaps a knee pad on my left leg… and I can avoid environmental injuries… and focus on shooting the other team and not get shot…

Altho I only got hit a few times… 1 close range shot by some idiot who couldn’t remember the surrender rule when within 5m or something… and i got a good one on the back of my shoulder cos i was running as low as possible and i got unlucky lol… the other shots didnt really hurt… and i left my box behind at the skirmish place accidentally… lol…

Neways… gotta go sleep…
Gnite all