My Father

When you stop and realize just how often and how powerfully God has had a hand on your life, it's astounding. It's humbling. And it makes you realize just how grateful you are to have Jesus in your life.

This morning on my drive to work I was blessed with the gift of clearly seeing the hand that he's had on my daughter and me through a rather difficult season in our lives. From simple event to event it became so obvious to me that he was not only guiding us but making our path straight. And when I realized just how perfectly he's been orchestrating each turn of event to not only protect us but to insure our growth and prosperity I was reduced to tears. Grateful happy tears.

Thank you Jesus. Thank you for being with us every single breath that we take. Thank you for the way you have moved mountains in my life, and thank you for the way you always keep us safe, really safe. Thank you for your undying grace and love.

You're so BIG, your love is so GREAT. You created the entire universe and hold it together, but you STILL have time to watch over someone as insignificant as me. That's nothing short of utterly astounding.

I know I'm not worthy of it. I know I don't deserve it. But I am and ever will be grateful for it. There are no words to express how immense and wonderful you are, and I want to live my life as a testimony to the glory that is you.

Thank you for letting me be aware of your hand on my life because I realize that there are so many times I don't see it. So many times you make my path straight and I am unaware. I never EVER want to take you for granted. Keep my eyes seeing, keep my ears open. Keep my heart faithful, for while I struggle to stay close to you, without your help I won't make it.

I tried life that way. I NEVER want to go back. I love you Lord. And I always will. Thank you for this morning and every second of my life. It's yours.

Email from the Past

When I first became a Christian I sent myself an email scheduled to arrive 1 year down the road. I wrote about how I was feeling, told myself about about my typical day which brought into focus exactly what my reality was back then. And I encouraged myself not to give up, because God had never give up on me. When I received that email I celebrated just how far I'd come on my walk with the Lord in that short period of time.

I sent myself another on that day scheduled to arrive 1 year later, and I just received that email yesterday.

It's amazing to receive email from your former self. It's encouraging to see how far you've come. And it's great to know that God was with you then, and he's with you now.

I surprisingly found that I was proud of past myself. Proud of how I've been working so hard to draw closer to our Creator. And so happy that every single day he draws me even closer.

Before I knew Christ I honestly hated myself. God has changed me so much, and these emails and words of encouragement from my past self have become precious to me.

Give it a try. It's rather amazing: http://www.futureme.org/

OpenOffice

While I'm on the subject of free stuff, I thought that I would mention OpenOffice.

I am completely sold on OpenOffice. So sold, in fact, that our Church will no longer be purchasing MS Office. We use Google Apps and OpenOffice now. I haven't used Microsoft Word or Excel for over a year now because I've been using the OpenOffice versions.

It's brought to you by the same people (Sun Microsystems) that write and give away Java - a program that you most likely use seamlessly every day as you browse the web.

The Church will save a tremendous amount of money over the next three years because we're going to use these free products.

I will admit that it's been difficult to get Staff to wrap their heads around the fact that we don't need Word, and Excel - we can use Write and Calc and the transition is nearly seamless because their functionality is nearly as identical as their user interface. Indeed there are small differences, but they are few.

The transition to Google Apps was done whole hat. Everyone made the switch at the same time. It was a bit chaotic.

But the switch to Open Office is being done slowly, and sometimes clandestinely. I have put the WRITE icon on desktops renamed to: WORD/Write and the difference was not discovered for some time.

The biggest issue everyone naturally worried about was whether or not Write would open Word files and conversly if others could open their OpenOffice Files. OpenOffice has been built to open MS Documents, and I have found this to be true for the most part. The one problem we've had on occasion is getting DRAW to open some Publisher documents. Other than that OpenOffice opens all MS Documents, no matter the version.

What I've done to insure that MS products will open our documents is to change the default file format.

To do that with OpenOffice:

1) First open a file in Write. (It doesn't matter which OpenOffice product you use, you can change the document format for all with any product open.)

2) Click on TOOLS on the toolbar across the top.

3) Move down to OPTIONS which is at the bottom or close to it.

4) Another Options window opens.

5) Click the plus sign (+) beside Load/Save

6) Click on GENERAL below that.

7) To the left find DEFAULT FILE FORMAT. There are two drop down boxes, the first to choose the Document Type, the second to choose the default file format.

For TEXT use RICH TEXT FORMAT
For SPREADSHEET use DATA INTERCHANGE FORMAT

If you follow the steps above anyone using any Word Processing Software or Spreadsheet software should be able to open your documents just as they are.

The others are best left as .odf which is Open Document Format. This format, .oft. is now an international standard, though WORD and EXCEL still don't like to open them. I wonder why... *wink*

Check out OpenOffice here!