doors to spiritual growth seem to open once you start doing your simple daily devotions. read the bible, pray, and hey, now Bro. Patrick wants to train and disciple a whole bunch of us. its really quite amazing. dynamic guy, bro patrick. anyhows, lets see how i take to it. this next step is probably gonna burn me even more, but the more heat there is, the more tempered the steel. heh. i'm gonna come out stronger, sleeker, smoother, and altogether more dangerous. The Devil sure is fighting a losing battle.

but on to less shiny things. i find i still can't understand my friend shunjing. he places such a high value on emotions, most of all love. he claims he sees the importance of calm collected planning along with the love that inspires the plan in the first place. more, he says he can maintain that high level of emotion and still be calm and collected in planning. i hate to be a harbinger of bad news, but thats a biological impossiblity. love and fear are probably the 2 strongest most basic emotions that humans can feel. either one of them, felt with the sheer intensity that inspires action, will escape the rational mind. u can maintain some degree of the emotion that inspires the plan. but this emotion has to come under the control of the rational mind if you want to plan anything. its just a fact. the full aknowledge ment of the significance of what you do drives you toward perfection. all well and good. perfection, however, must be practical still.

so we want what is carried out in church to be better than what can be found in the world. thats fine. better in what way? are u striving for what is better? as in of a higher quality? or simply different and original? they aren't exactly the same thing. granted they are not mutually exclusive, but they are not the same thing. something 'new' and 'fresh' may not be of as a hihg a quiality as what is 'tried and true' and that is the crux of the matter. maybe we can re-engineer certain games and activities to better suit us. but come up with completely new stuff? maybe if we had 6 mths instead of 6 days, we could come up wiht 1 or 2 new games? if they're good, we'd probably make a fortune selling the patent to like, what was that company that gave us monopoly again?

last off, its this whole assumption about everyone plays by the same rules. not everyone has as few people controlling their lives to some degree. or has that much time. its seriously unrealistic to ask a student to take out the rest of his day for a meeting and want to do something special before. and then when it doesn't happen, whine sob and cry over it. i'm sorry, its just an unrealistic expectation and yer setting yerself up to be disappointed. and getting totally ticked off by something like that without getting an explanation is just childish. why do i always have to say the mean stuff? grow up man