John’s post is well worth the read. Who Wesley would send to Hell | John Meunier.

This extended adolescence looks more like society has turned into little kids. Some of which is due to the adults saying that the kids are growing up “too fast” and the kids themselves not taking responsibility for themselves. I think this article addresses the latter.

Memoir: how I put an end to my extended adolescence | torontolife.com: “It wasn’t the suit that needed to change. I’d entered this process boyishly believing in magic. But standing there in the cluttered back room, I realized I had learned something from the time I’d spent with Frank: manliness was something I would have to work at every day. The suit alone couldn’t do it for me.”

I had a week where I asked the students what questions they have. One question was “Why would God End the World?”

So here’s this week’s message:

That phrase is in the bible from one person’s count, 365 times. As people have told me one for everyday of the year. As I have journeyed through this Lenten season. There have been several things, I feel, that God has been speaking to me on.

1. Continue the less meat, higher veggie diet. 
2. Keep the caffeine consumption low.
3. Teach the Youth Group about not fearing things
4. Continue to teach on Love your neighbor and your Enemy

I’ve been teaching on what it means to be the church, in the context of love. Which means I’ve be trying to tell them about loving others more than yourself.

There is one thing, though, that through the 46 days of Lent that has been continuing to resound louder and louder and that is don’t fear. The kids in the youth group are constantly bombarded by fear based things. We wonder why we end up in a culture that tries to medicate kids and teens, when they are just being kids.

So my next quest is to figure out how to communicate how to not fear, and love others to the point that others may hate you.

Here’s the link to Sound Cloud where I uploaded it.

Here’s the Bible Verses from my talk:

Paul said, in Colossians 3, 13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
and Peter said (1 Peter 4:8) 8 Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.
And this is because, Jesus, who was God, but also fully human while getting put on the cross said, (Luke23:34a)34 Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”[a]

Here’s the Cat video:

Here is what I taught tonight to the youth group.

The Jeff Show – #8

…WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 7 AM THURSDAY TO 7 PM EST FRIDAY…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GAYLORD HAS NOW ISSUED A WARNING FOR A DANGEROUS COMBINATION OF HEAVY SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW FROM 7 AM THURSDAY TO 7 PM EST FRIDAY.
The area in pink, or whatever shade that is, over the land is where the dangerous winter weather is expected. The blue/gray area is where there is a watch or there is a potential for dangerous winter weather.

I’ve looked through the model runs from last night, which is how HPC got this low track. This looks good. In fact, this a bit further south, which means we are more likely in the colder air so that there will be a minimum of rain mixing in with the snow. Winds don’t look like they will get to Blizzard conditions, but it will be blowing enough late Thursday that it won’t matter in some of the more open areas.

So for the 12 hours ending at 7pm Thursday (00zFri), here are the snow fall accumulations to be expected. The best snow fall areas will be in the southwest portion of the NWS Gaylord county warning area with the axis of the highest amounts roughly running from Frankfort to Drummond Island. For the 12 hour period (7a-7p), these snow fall totals exceed the warning criteria of 6 inches in 12 hours.

This is for 7pm Thursday to 7am Friday, with the axis of the best snow still along the line from Frankfort to Drummond Island. While these totals don’t exceed the warning criteria for 12 hours. when added to the previous map, the 24 hour totals exceed the 24 hour warning criteria of 8 inches. Not to mention that the winds overnight will be blowing about 20 to 30 mph.

Of course, let’s not forget our friend, lake effect. It will continue through the weekend. Some areas receive more snow on top of the storm system snow through the weekend. Too early to tell the amounts. However, Friday and Friday night could continue to be significant, as the mid level moisture will be there. Saturday and Sunday, depending on how much moisture is there will determine whether we get light to moderate amounts, or moderate to heavy. Stay tuned.

I will be Going to GRR and back on Thursday…I’ll try to get some pictures and do some on the fly blogging if I can.

I have a lot of friends from my past. I seem to lose touch with them. I have reconnected some of them through Facebook more recently, and that has been great, but I still haven’t reconnected with a lot of them. In this case, this friend was my colleague and boss while I was at the South Pole in 1994-1995.  Her name was Kathie Sharp.

In 1994, I was in between meteorology jobs, when I an ad in the magazine “Weatherwise” caught my eye. It talked about being a weather observer at the South Pole. I applied, and as it happened, the person that was supposed to winter over for that year, had just quit to take another job. I needed a passport, so I got the ball rolling, and Antarctic Support Associates of Englewood, CO invited me out to be interviewed. That’s where I met Kathie. She was to be the senior meteorologist for the winter. She interviewed me a couple of times during the day that I was in the ASA offices, as well as be 3 other people. By the end of the day, I was hired and I had a lot of things to do in the next two months (physicals, paperwork, etc.). Everything clicked. I could and have made remarks that this is where God wanted me. Too many things that happened that it couldn’t be coincidence.  In fact, Kathie also being a Christian was one of the reasons that I got the job.

During the interviews, I was asked what I do if I got depressed or lonely, something that happens during the Antarctic winter season when you are down to only 28 people on the station. I said something about my faith bringing me comfort and strength. So one of the other interviewers got a little worked up, afraid that I was some “Holy Roller,” and would be in other people’s faces about my faith. Kathie fought for me in the meeting. I was re-interviewed about my faith and had some questions asked about it, which I didn’t notice, as being out of the ordinary, until in discussion with Kathie in the middle of the winter, she told me about it.

So from October 26th, 1994 until November 5th, 1995, I was at the South Pole station in Antarctica. There was a hectic “summer period” then in Feb, 1995, the last of the summer people left us 28 souls for the winter-over period. The 28 of us, I would say were like a dysfunctional family that were cooped up too long after a blizzard. Kathie and I were to launch balloons, do weather obs, etc. and she was kind of a big sister to me the of the newbies. First time at the pole and I was wintering over. We butted heads a few times, but we were pretty decent friends along with Chris the Sci-tech.

I, unfortunately lost touch with everyone. The last time I talked to anybody was in 2001, when I went to Boulder to radar class. I was able to Call Chris and his dad, Cleve, who I also knew from “Pole.” We talked about some of those we knew from the crew and where they were, but for the most part that was the last time I talked to anyone from my winter-over year. I have done Google searches and Facebook searches. I reconnected with a few on Linked In, and Facebook, but Kathie eluded me.

However, I did run into a website a some years ago that is dedicated to the South Pole Station, by an “ex-polie.” I got on the site every few months to see who is wintering over,  and see who is blogging so that I could subcribe to it and . Since the new crew arrived for this season,  I went to that site the other day. As I scrolled through the news before looking at the blogger list, I noticed this little link.

Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to reconnect with you Kathie. You will be missed.

We are supposed to love…our God.
… our neighbors.
…our enemies.

When I see the American Christian church as of late, I see more people, drifting back to what’s comfortable. That is to say, finding a set of explicit dos and don’ts that will make us acceptable in the sight of God. However, we have become so rigidly adherent to the “rules” that we call heresy, if someone tries to stray outside the lines and love someone that they have told that God has turned His back on. However, as I have now listened to the Bible for the 4th or 5th year, and the New Testament the year before that, I’m realizing that as Jesus said in Matthew 23: 15 ¹⁵ “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. (NIV)

I have looked through commentaries, and despite the interpretations to the positive, we still try to exclude and push away those that that are marginalized. We as a country are drifting away. Not all of us, but this country was based on loving your neighbor. At least that’s what I see when I study history. We aren’t to judge others sins. We are to love them, and through that love, we are win them, so that they will continue to pay the love forward.

As I listened to James Scheer preach this week at church, I was reminded of this. He preached out of James, which tells us we are no better than anyone else when it comes to loving God. The image of cartoon that I saw a week or two before called “Coffee with Jesus,” kept coming up in my mind. We are to love everyone. It’s difficult. When we fail, we have to realize that Jesus died for us so that our failures aren’t counted against us. We have to move on, and continue to figure out how to love everyone.

image from Flickr.com:

he(art)geek