“When…the soul learns what joy truly is—not a feeling, but a Person.” Spectacular!!!

Jason Gray - Remind Me Who I Am (Official Music Video) youtu.be/QSIVjjY8Ou8?is=EO5d… via @YouTube

Third day- King of Glory youtu.be/Aqo-adRyM_k?is=tOc4… via @YouTube

Okay, this is kinda wild. I was just thinking about this guy Dennis Rice today. I shared a hotel room with him at a Bill Glass prison outreach circa 2002 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I didn’t even realize that he’d passed away, but he died exactly 13 years ago today, June 21, 2013! Go figure! He was a former Manson family associate, and had participated in a 1971 armed robbery attempt (the Hamburger Stand/Hawthorne incident) to steal guns and break Manson out of LA County Jail. The group was caught in a shootout with police, and Rice served time in San Quentin for his role. While in prison, he had a dramatic conversion to Christianity (he had previously described meeting Manson as thinking he’d met Jesus, then encountered the real Savior Jesus while in prison). After his release, he became an evangelist and prison minister, sharing his testimony in many facilities across the U.S. He spoke at events with Bill Glass Behind the Walls / Champions for Life prison ministry and other outreach programs, often addressing inmates about transformation through faith. I remember Dennis telling me while we were in South Dakota that after he got saved, he had gone to meet Charlie in prison to witness to him. “But Charlie,” Dennis pleaded, “what about the truth?” He said Charlie replied, “Well Jesus Christ is the truth.” Kind of baffling when you think about it. Here is Charles Manson acknowledging that he actually knows the Truth, and yet he is still rejecting God’s sacred offer of salvation. As it is written, Some believed and some didn’t. Acts 28:24 TLB

Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around Lyric Video youtu.be/nJhgEMKLuHI?is=ducA… via @YouTube

All creatures great and small, the Lord God made them all. How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Psalm 104:24 In his hand is the life of every creature
    and the breath of all mankind. Job 12:10

I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them. Psalm 139:14-16 NKJV

The greatest Texas Easter photo of all time or the greatest photo ever taken in Texas? The pure, unabashed joy on San Antonio farmer Sam Smith's face as he celebrates rain on Easter Sunday after a prolonged drought in 1951 takes me to my happy place every Easter. Taken by Harvey Belgin and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

California has the distinction of being the only state in the union that is mentioned in the Bible. It is in Song of Solomon 6:11, "I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley."

The Stone youtu.be/-k2_ey9ZX6E?si=0hbt… via @YouTube

Happy Sunday! It is never too late!

I love whatever is wrong with y’all. 😂 Brother up front in green is nailing it and carrying the team in this Charlie Brown dance! Love this family’s spirit! ❤️

Five O'Clock People "Blame" youtu.be/0xURrSVQJVs?si=gZt-… via @YouTube

PART 1 Yes, and I’ll tell you why I’m convinced it does. I went to college as an adult in my late twenties. I’d been somewhat of a cultural Christian when I was younger, but if your faith isn’t real, college will strip away the facade, and that’s pretty much what happened. Then my little brother committed suicide after he found out his wife and best friend were having an affair. And that did it. I was now agnostic…even leaning toward atheism. Ended up dropping out of college, hanging around bars and finally hard drugs. But people that cared about me helped me when I was down and out without expecting anything in return, and that had a deep and profound influence on me, so I was able to taper off drugs, and sort of get my life back on track. My best friend even told me a that a lot of physicists start off as atheists, but become more and more convinced of an intelligence somewhere in the works of the cosmos as they progress in their studies. So I started reading a lot of physics books, and I’d think and wonder about God, not the Christian concept of God, but the creator of universe God. I didn’t believe in a personal God, nor did I believe in eternal life for humans. I became a sort of scientific pantheist. I figured that in his normal state, God was a unified particle/force that was infinitely dense and infinitely hot, courtesy of Leon Lederman’s book, The God Particle, about the search for the Higgs boson. While God might be able to conceptualize things like love and hate, good and evil, right and wrong, chess and music, he couldn’t really experience those things in isolation. So he calculated and BIG BANG!!! He exploded into a universe where sentient being could evolve and think and wonder about him, thereby giving meaning to his life. Eventually all the stars would burn out, all life in the universe would cease, gravity would slow the expansion of the universe and reverse it, culminating in the BIG CRUNCH; God would be back together and all this would be part of his experience, although I didn’t think God was able to communicate with humans even if he wanted to. In 1997 I was living with another chess master in San Antonio who happened to be a devout atheist. One day I was in my bedroom reading a book by the physicist Paul Davies, God & the New Physics. He wrote, if God created the universe, then it has purpose. If that purpose is never achieved, then God will have failed. While I was contemplating that statement, an overwhelming feeling of vulnerability hit me, really, it overcame and engulfed me…and I’ve never felt so profoundly vulnerable and utterly helpless ever before in my life. And I knew it was not being generated by my own mind…it was coming from outside of me. It wasn’t physically painful, but it was psychologically and emotionally devastating. I wondered at that moment—perhaps God CAN communicate somehow—via the quantum/sub atomic realm…that perhaps God had taken a risk in creating the Universe…that perhaps he could fail, and then nothing would have any meaning. I rushed downstairs to the living room where my roommate was watching television. I was in tears so I just blurted it out. “We have to save God!” Because of my worldview at the time, it was the only way I could interpret the experience. He held up both his hands and admonished me, “I don’t want nothing to do with that!” I glanced at the television; I suppose a church commercial had just come on. This guy was writing on one of those big paper tablets that sit on a tripod. And he wrote: Beware, Satan will try to distract you. I pointed to it. I knew it must mean something, just the timing of it and all. My roommate told me, “You can’t look for religious signs on public television, next thing I know, you’ll be saying I’m Satan.” “I don’t think Satan’s a person, (I do now), maybe it’s an idea that God can fail.” “Well I don’t think God’s a person either,” he replied.