Overcoming Static Friction

I once read somewhere that with faith the size of a mustered seed you could move a mountain into an ocean. Well, I pray often that my faith will grow that big, but for now I'm practicing my microscopic faith by moving much smaller things into much shallower water (well, just into mud really). Recently we've taken to moving buildings here at Pine Valley. How all of this came about is a bit of a long story and thats not really what this post is about. Here are the details you do need so I can make my point: a church in town started to add a gym onto their building and were unable to finish it so they donated it to us. The building is big, really big and there is a lot of materiel and its heavy. So now we have this 60' by 100' building that is standing some five or six miles from our property and we need to get it here. As I thought about this project, mostly after the fact, the thing that struck me is that movement is hard work and also buildings are heavy. The thing about movement though is that the initial energy is the most important, most difficult part. Once you achieve forward momentum, keeping it is a little less of a struggle. This became clearly evident in trying to slide a pile of 60' long trusses weighing in at over 22,000 lbs. Again though, that really isn't the point.

I think if you want to learn some things about life, the best thing to do is look around you. A lot of things are metaphors for bigger and deeper things if you allow them to be.

The first step is the hardest one. The effort it takes to get up off the couch can feel exhausting. Reaching up for that first hand-hold and pulling your feet away from the ground is always the toughest. Breaking the static friction is what gets anybody anywhere. Its what got us out here to western PA, its what got us into this great adventure of adoption (much, much more on that to come soon!) and it is what will take us head long into whatever God has in store for us next if we are willing to tighten up our shoe laces, put our shoulders down, and push hard into the next first step.          

The Start

So we're writing a blog. The jaded, cynical part of me has put this off for a long time because I know there are far more blogs then there are people who actually want to read blogs. Also, I can't help feeling that it might be sort of arrogant of me to assume I have something new and important to say to the universe, which is what I feel like I should have if I'm going to publish it on the internet. I've always been of the opinion that the majority of what takes place on the internet is man standing in the wilderness, looking out into eternity and screaming at the top of his lungs "I exist", and expecting the universe to notice and respond. Anyway, despite these nagging feelings, I decided to start this thing anyway.

On an airplane about 8 years ago, at some crazy hight above the massive expanse of the Atlantic ocean, I started writing a journal. It was the first one I had ever written (and the last) and, unfortunately, a number of years later, on a flight headed in the opposite directing, I left that journal in the seat back pouch of a KLM Royal Dutch 747. I'm sure it is now in some landfill in the Netherlands buried under a hundred feet of discarded wooden shoes, broken windmills and whatever else they throw away in Holland. All of this is completely irrelevant except to say that even though no one else ever cracked the cover of that knock off Mole Skin, almost elegant looking, little black journal, it was good for me. It helped me process and work through the things that happen to me, through me and around me and that's what I am hoping for here. Christina and I want to share the things, the extraordinary things hidden in the mundane things, but, also we need to process and think through these things. So here we go! Feel free to come along if you'd like, or just stop in from time to time, or ignore it altogether if you want, but anyway, here we go.