I was playing Hide ‘n Seek with my 5-year-old nephew, Matthew, this weekend.

You have to understand something about him. He plays by his own rules and those rules generally are skewed ridiculously in his favor.

So this time, I explained the rules to him: I had him count to 50 (count to 10 five times), and then come find me. When it was his turn to hide, he had to stay hidden until I found him or come out when I called him.

This game went on for a while, and we were both enjoying it. I found some really good hiding places, and he had quite a difficult time finding me.

His hiding places were rather funny. Once he hid under the blanket on our bed. I found him immediately, but “pretended” not to know where he was. So I’m walking around the room “wondering” where Matthew is, and he’s giggling like crazy under the blankets thinking, “uncle Paul is soooo unobservant.”

Eventually, I find him, and he’s all sweaty, hair matted, with a huge smile on his face.

“Ok, I’ll count five times, and you go hide now, Uncle Paul!”

We did this routine a few times. Twice he hid under the covers on our bed, once under the futon with his butt stucking out of the bottom, once in the closet where I had previously hid, and once under the desk where his gramma was working on the computer.

At one point in the game, I was hiding. I thought it’d be funny to hide as out in the open as possible, so I hid in the guest-room, where the toy chest is. There was a jacket hanging on the door, so I just put the jacket over my face, stood there in plain sight, and tucked my feet behind a couple of boxes.

I heard Matthew run around for a while and then he came in the room. I figured he’d find me almost immediately until I heard him digging through the toy chest, getting out some legos. Then I heard him sit down and start playing with legos. I peekd out from under the coat and looked at him, his back to me. I snuck out from my hiding place and hovered over him, but he was completely engaged in whatever he was building.

“What’re you DOING,” I asked.

“I got tired of playing that,” he replied, as he continued playing with his little plastic blocks.

Here we were, heavily engaged in something, enjoying the company of one another, and instantly he was side-tracked and disconnected from me.

On top of that, when I prodded, his response was completely self-absorbed.

I walked away, shaking my head, thinking to myself, “you are soooo five” and then stopped in the middle of the hallway as it dawned on me that I am constantly exhibiting that kind of behavior with God. It was humbling and comforting to think that He never shakes His head and walks away, wishing we would hurry up and mature.

“What’re you building,” I asked as I returned to the room, eager to reconnect.

Last night when I got home, we watched some TV, had dinner, and I went on to do some work for a couple of hours.

I just recently got the Spiderman 2 game for Xbox and have been all excited about it without much time to put into it. It’s one of those addictive games that once you play for a few minutes, you’re hooked for a good hour or more.

…so I finish my work around 11pm and think, “well, maybe I’ll play some Spidey 2 for 20 minutes or so.” …you can see where I’m going with this. Around 1:30, I’m bleary-eyed and my throat hurts and I’m tearing myself away to go to bed because tomorrow’s a work-day.

7:30 comes around and my body is protesting, as are my wife and cat who don’t REALLY go to sleep until I do… because somehow our sleeping patterns are all tied together.

Needless to say, I’m pretty tired today. This is not a new condition for me, having stayed up too late, playing video games. Maybe not new, but also not recent. I haven’t played video games late into the night in about 6 months… about the last time I played Rainbow Six online.

…tonight I have more work to do. …I also just goto Otto Octavius’ house last night… They say “stupidity” is knowing what the right thing is to do and doing the opposite. I wonder what time I’ll go to bed tonight?

This past weekend has been a whirlwind of activity.

Last Thursday, my inlaws (brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and three of their friends) came to visit. We had a VERY full house. The kids came, we played games, went out for airsoft, ate and ate and ate, watched movies, and enjoyed one anothers’ company. It was a great time.

They left Saturday morning, and both Natalie and I were sad to see them go, but immediately began cleaning as quickly as possible for the next incoming guests who arrived about a half-hour later: my parents.

That evening, my friend Nathan, my sister and nephew came over for Easter dinner (on a Saturday night).

Natalie has always thought it odd that we have ham on Easter, and decided to try something a little more appropriate to the holiday: lamb. It was incredible to say the least.

Natalie had requested that I prepare something to share for Easter, but I found myself really struggling to come up with an appropriate ending to the study I had put together: “The Last Adam.”

I wanted to address the question, “What is the significance of Christ’s ressurection?” He rose from the dead. So what?

I came upon this verse in 1 Corinthians 15:45:
So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a lifegiving spirit.

What does “The Last Adam” mean? I mean, we can logically approach it and say, “last” signifies that there won’t be any more… but why “Adam?”

I came to the following conclusion: The first Adam was the beginning of a new creation and begins a line of history that is finite, cursed and that will eventually come to an end. Christ, at the point of the resurrection, begins a whole new line of history; eternal and blessed.

So what?

2 Corinthians 5:17

¹⁷Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:

“if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” – In the original greek, the words used for “new creation” are: Kalinos Ktisis. Literally, the verse is saying, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new thing created of a new kind”

The new creation doesn’t begin when you’re born again; it begins at the resurrection of Jesus. The moment you’re born again is the moment your eyes are open to see the new creation and become part of it… that is to say, once we accept Him, we come on track in the new timeline. All of this is made available to us due to His resurrection.

So what? Where do go from here? We’re on the road, but where are we headed and how do we stay focused on the goal?

I think that can be summarized in the presentation of the Bema.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

So last week, we’re sitting in church and they announce, “be sure to set your clocks ahead an hour next week Saturday night!”

…turns out the whole time-change thing isn’t until next week. So I’m wondering: how many people are going to end up going to church this Easter at the wrong time because of last week’s mistaken announcement. I’m tempted to go to church an hour early just to see who shows up at the wrong time… but that means I’d have to get up early. Just thinking about it makes me have to pee.

What’s with this whole time-change thing anyway? Places in Indiana don’t have to do the time change. Somebody did something right there. Why do the rest of us have to endure this major inconvenience every year and mess with our sleep schedules? What a pain.

Maybe someday we’ll be free from the tyranny of daylight savings.

I can’t believe how many people have asked me about my blog, recently. I’m like, “Blog?”

Ok, so I’m in the tech field, I design and develop websites, but don’t know anything about blogging.

So then I get this assignment, “we’re building a community blog system. You have to design the interface.” So here I go, head-first into learning about the blogging community.

…then my sister gets a blog. Every day, she’s on IM, sending me her blog address to drive me over to her blog to read it. I’m thinking, “aren’t people supposed to just go to blogs on their own? If you solicit them, isn’t that more like… a newsgroup or something?” *shrug*

So here I am blogging. My biggest hesitation to this whole thing has been, “what do I talk about?”

My friends are like, “you’re a funny guy. You’ll come up with something. Give us a peek into ‘Paul land.'”

“No.”

“Oh.”

*sigh* but here I am: a lazy guy, blogging. Doesn’t keeping up with a blog require effort?

As a kid, I always used to instinctively have to go pee whenever effort was about to be involved… it was my body’s natural defense against work. I can only imagine the overtime my over-worked bladder is going to go into over this whole “blogging” thing.

…though I must say this: I’m not as lazy as some of those bloggers out there I’ve seen. What is with not using any capital letters? How much effort are we really avoiding here? Wow. To me, that almost seems like MORE effort to consciously not use any capital letters.

There are two kinds of people who type sans-caps: those who are ignorant to the fact that there ARE capital letters in standard English grammar, and those who are apparently just plain lazy. You know who you are.

Anyway, this is my blog… and these are my ramblings…