Beyond Belief

Ancient and Almighty God, your people are desperate and hurting. We are broken and lost. The suffering is more than we can bear. We are defeated. Our hearts are devastated with sorrow; empathy for our brothers and sisters consumes us all day long. We do not know where to begin, where to go, how to help, how to love. We are humbled and humiliated by Your Might: You are God. We are mere men. In the midst of our trials, the contrast could not be clearer. We bow in awe of the Author of Creation. We are reminded of your Supremacy and our utter helplessness.

Father of Mercy, enter into the misery and hurting of a needy people. By your unmatched authority, we beg you to dispatch legions of angels to comfort those who mourn, to strengthen the rescuers. Lift the veil of cold and callous hearts that they might, for the first time ever, experience the reality of a loving God. Patiently teach your church how to love those in desperation. Grant us boldness to respond to the images of New Orleans with confident supplication before the Throne of the King; the Only Hope and Help. Wrench us free of our utterly disgusting sin of turning our heads the other way while millions suffer. We confess our inclination to pretend we can go on living our lives the same. We repent of our self-exaltation, of our singular occupation with our own comfort. Teach us how to sacrifice out of love. Humble us before your Majesty that we might be used to minister to hurting people.

We rest on You, Jesus Christ. We praise Your Name. For where else can we go? Who else can can help? What other source of Hope is there?

Pictures! Pictures!

If y'all want to post pictures, you'll need a free picture hosting account. You store the pictures on another server, which gives them a unique web address, and then you put that web address in your post so that Blogger will fetch that picture and show it on the blog. There is free picture hosting at www.flickr.com.

If that doesn't make sense, just send me the picture(s), and I'll post them with whatever comments you send.

Here are some that Ben sent me to start the blog with. I also changed the main picture for the EE Group Guys profile, and unfortunately, we don't have one with all the blog memebers on it. Oh well.

Name Dropping...

Let me set the stage for you: It's 1:59am, Bruner is in the midst of a hives breakout from eating raw cow meat a few hours earlier. I loaded him down with Benadryl and now he and I are playing the waiting game--do we go pay a visit to old Saint Marys or do we chance it and see if he makes it through the night? I thought the wisest course of action was to chance it and just check his pulse in the morning. In the meantime, though, Mr. Bruner and I sit here trying to deal with the heavy burden of naming this blogsite. Some potentials that were quickly dispensed with were: "Band of Brothers"; "The Good the Bad and the Ugly"...which, after considering our reformed background we decided to rename, "The Bad, the Ugly, and the Self-righteous". Next, we thought it might be a bit clever to try and make the title a joke...you know, one of those jokes something like..."A preacher (Brent), a lawyer (Nick and Jason), a mayor (Ben), a cowboy (Jimbo), a missionary (Tom), a banker (Rass), a prodigy (Jake), a frat guy (Tim), and a parrot head (Spiffy) walk into a bar..." But then we realized that is way too long for a title...and we realized we're not witty enough to come up with a punch line that would fit all those characters.

Long story short, we end where we began: no title for this blogsite. So, please humor us and allow your first posts to be suggestions for naming this site.

Also, suggest links that you want us to put to the right. Can't wait to see your blogs!

Ben (& Jason)