From the weekend (again)

A couple of things:

1. Talladega is among my favorite tracks in NASCAR. But yesterday's race had a really bad ending. On my list of villain drivers, numbers one and two are Juan Pablo Montoya and Kyle Busch - in no particular order. Much to my chagrin they ran 1st & 2nd yesterday after a couple of late fender benders sent Dale Jr. and Tony Stewart to the back - Jr. did somehow rally to finish 10th according to ESPN this morning (after being 29th with 5 to go). I actually found myself rooting for Jeff Gordon after Jimmy Johnson committed restrictor plate suicide and followed Michael Waltrip to the high side trying to block Busch and Montoya (Haven't you seen Days of Thunder? He's just setting you up, look high, go low. But alas Michael and Jimmy backed up like no other.) But I will say, the COT was much more competitive than previous plate track races in it, which gives me hope that the new car won't be the death of competitive racing on the big tracks.

2. There is a reason people who run home improvement businesses can charge healthy prices. Specifically they have knowledge that most of us don't, they have tools we don't have (and ordinarily don't need), and what they do is hard work (especially when you don't know what you're doing - yes, it is possible to bend metal with 2 pairs of pliers). Replacing pulls and hinges in our bathrooms proved a much larger task than you'd think (and of course there are 4 hinges in each bathroom unlike the other 22 (which couldn't be seen without removing other items, thus the ones I ordered won't work on those 4, guess that'll have to wait until next week when I can get some new ones in here - because you can fairly assume no one in Joplin carries the hinges I need!).

3. Robin's sermon yesterday morning was right on the money. He managed to step on lots of toes, well mine anyway. The text was Daniel 5 and he brought out the fact that a big part of Belshazzar's problem was that he was irreverent and he didn't care that he was dishonoring God. The question is, even for those of us who are in church every Sunday, are in a small group, etc., how often do we honor God with our lips, but refuse to surrender our lives to Him? Even worse, how often do we know we're dishonoring Him and just not care? Robin drew a connection between this story and Jesus talking about the people who on judgment day will say to Him that they did all these things in His name - to which He will reply that He never knew them. Ouch! So you mean the ones getting that response were "good" people? Wasn't exactly what I was hoping to hear. Even those of us who are in and around church a lot aren't immune to the temptation to do things our own way, thus removing Jesus from His rightful seat as Lord of our lives.