So I started this journal with the intent to be raw. so far I have told you all about my take on evolution. Is that raw? not really. raw for me is kind of a scary thing because I know how raw I can be and I know that a lot of other people don't want to see that. So I guess I'm gonna try anyways.

Luxy is sleeping. Thank God. Heather has been in kind of a funk for the last couple weeks and that coupled with other things drove me into a nervous breakdown about Wednesday I guess it was. I'm also really nervous about if we can even afford this place we just moved into. It starting to seem like we can't without some major spending cut-backs (of which there is not a whole lot to cut). So this week I'm deciding to just trust in God and try to pay the bills on time as best I can. I don't make very much. This place costs a ton. Our rent is roughly 60 or 65 percent of my take home pay.

Yesterday I got mad while I was trying to install the little safety latches on the cabinets in the kitchen so that Luxy can't open them. I never cuss. But I did. Really loud. And from across the apartment. I asked Heather where the damn scissors were. She marathon ran them out to me. It was kind of sad that I never do that, but when I did it had the desired effect. That makes me sad. If I just said "where are the scissors" she might have just said "I don't know, find them yourself."

I love the story of Esther. I was reading it the last couple of days. Mordecai awesome. He doesn't mince words or anything. After Haman tells King Xerxes that he'll pay a bunch of money into the palace treasury if Xerxes will order that the Jews be killed, Moredecai (because of a patriotic act he had done earlier) gains the upper hand over Haman and when Haman had been hanged and Mordecai is given his place as the lord of the land he askes Xerxes if he could write a new law to repeal the one that Haman had written. When Xerxes said he could he didn't just write "No you may not attack and kill every Jew you see on the 13th day of Adar". Instead he writes, "Every Jew shall have the right to defend his life and his family and annihilate every man, woman or child who dares attack them or looks like they might". He basically turns the thing around. So while the Jews are in captivity under the Medo-Persian Empire, Mordecai gives them the right to kill all their Persian neighbors for (what turns out to be) two days of bloodshed. 76,300 Persians are killed in two days throughout the empire. And then they celebrate it and commemorate the day when the Lord brought them vengence against their enemies, of whom the King was their friend...Weird story. And after all that slaughter the king just says, "Look, tons of my people have been killed. So what are we gonna do today?" It's pretty amazing.

This morning I was reading "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel and he was talking about all the Messianic prophecies. Apparently there are something like 48 Messianic prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. I've only come across some of them. One I hadn't heard before though, that he pointed out, was in Daniel 9:26-29 about the time from when King Artaxerxes commanded that the Jews (under Neamiah) should be allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple (445 B.C.) to the time when the Messiah would come and be killed and all would be fulfilled would be 69 7's (which if taken to mean years (sevens means time, but not any specific measure of it...could be days, weeks, months or years) comes out to 483 years, or 38 AD). So the general consensus has it that Jesus was killed in approximately 33 AD. Although that prophecy in such a sense is not exact exact (unless we've got it all wrong and Jesus was actually killed in 38 AD), it's pretty darn close, and what's five years give or take when it's prophecied almost 500 years before it happens? We give evolutionists the benefit of +-8 million years or whatever on their radio carbon dating but for 5 years we trip up. That's kind of funny. Strobel was saying that there have been plenty of Jewish rabbis that have been challenged to disprove that Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled all of the Messianic prophecies and he said that none of them could. Just amazing.

Anyway. It's been a rough week but I've rediscovered my Bible which has really been helping me through. Even at the basest of faith levels (I'm not quite that low right now), the stories of all these amazing things that God does through people and all of the incredible teachings of Christ and the mind boggling complexity and yet simplicity of it all is staggering and inspiring at the same time. It's food for thought for like your whole life. Hemingway only takes about two weeks to digest. Just an aside. Breakfast awaits. Farewell and ado to you fair spanish ladies.