I used to spend every summer at Camp Eagles Nest in the Pisgah Forest in North Carolina. I will be quick to admit that these had to have been some of the best summers of my life. The contrast to the lifestyle of living in the Carolina mountains compared to suburban, flat South Florida was stark, and one that I never took for granted every summer I was there. The camp was divided up into four “tribes” and you earned tribal feathers by accomplishing tasks in different areas of expertise, such as archery, pottery, canoe/kayaking, etc.

I was way into the off-site activities, so always signed up for the wilderness classes and canoe/kayaking classes. I progressed through my time there and for my last summer, was all set to earn my “Chief” feather. This involved several different tasks, including creating a fire without any equipment, only wood. Now, if anyone has watched Surviviorman or Man vs Wild lately on the Discovery Channel, you have seen this attempted and it is no easy feat. Building a fire requires a lot of good kindling, and requires technique to fuel the spark. Often this includes either making a bow or doing the old friction through rubbing horizontally across another piece of wood (i.e. Castaway). After much work and time, you usually can get a small ember going. Once you have that, you must quickly move it to the kindling, which is very thin, dry wood that quickly ignites. That kindling will quickly build heat and grow and sure enough, you will have a fire within a few minutes.

I think spiritual life, particularly in my experience the past year, is like this process. Sometimes we desire to build a spiritual fire but it takes much work and discipline to finally get that fire really going. I think by the end of last summer, I desired to be reignited, but it has taken sometime to build that in me. And the time required more cooperation by me in what God wanted to do. Its amazing how much repentance as well as just forcing yourself to read the Word will work. God’s word never returns void (Isa 55.11) and even in moments when we least desire to have that sort of discipline, it can pay off the most.

So… now, I am satisfied. The past two weeks I’ve been visiting new churches, and although I have not found one to be my home, I have been convicted, encouraged, and challenged by the sermons. I am really ready to start serving, leading, submitting to the authority of a church, taking classes, and just being completely devoted to it all again. And the only one I can thank is The One who created me. Thank you.

As you can tell, I switched servers and I am starting from scratch. But I do have a design idea, so check back soon, because I will change the design and hopfully update a bit more often!

Thought this was a nice followup article to the previous post:

February 15, 2007 - A House Subcommittee hearing on global warming scheduled for February 14 was postponed due to a snow storm. The hearing title is: “Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?”

The subcommittee is part of the Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by liberal John Dingell (D-MI). Subcommittee chairman is Rick Boucher (D-WV).

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi created a new House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which will take over the responsibilities of the energy committee in dealing with climate issues.

Both Dingell and Boucher plan on inviting former Vice President Al Gore to speak to the committee on climate change issues.

With liberals in control of committee hearings and assignments, it is unlikely that global warming skeptics like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) will receive a fair hearing for at least the next two years.

Senator Inhofe formerly chaired the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee and authored “A Skeptic’s Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism.”

Well, the IPCC is planning to release a report today about global warming, which everyone is expecting to say that all the warming that we have seen recently is man-made. Certainly this is a fairly widespread opinion and there are some scientist that agree with this statement. My latest issue is the number of scientists who are being really ignored right now, who are about to be at the point of kicking and flailing their arms for anyone to hear or listen to them. People like MIT’s professor of climatology Richard Lindzen or John Christy, professor of climatology at University of Alabama. The list is long, including some very notable scholars and leaders in their fields, but I am rather stunned how ignored they have been, in place of radical politics.

Now, being raised a bit of a hippie myself, I am certainly for a change in consumerism and how we waste resources. If we can reduce emissions so that humans can breathe better, great. If we can recycle more and find ways to have renewable resources, I’m all for it. But to spend billions freaking out about a trend that may have nothing to do with man’s actual actions, that’s where I have issues. If I had a choice between more money for AIDS in Africa or reactionary measures to something that the scientific community can’t even agree on, I am going with AIDS (or poverty, or any other plethora of worldwide problems). So, while I’ll certainly agree that there is a warming trend, and there’s plenty of science toback that up, I am more skeptical about man’s implications in that trend. Here’s a short list, though certainly not thorough, of arguments people have had against the man-made global warming trend:

1. The earth has been definitely warmer than it is today within the past 2000 years. In the medieval times, the average temperatures were higher than what we currently have. Even in 1937-1938, the Arctic recorded higher temperatures than what we are reporting now.
2. The ice melting rate is less than what it has been. The rate at which the snowcaps are melting in the Arctic is half the rate than they were melting before Ford ever put a Model-T on the assembly line.
3. Warming is not occuring everywhere. Take a place like Greenland, who has actually seen a rather steep rate of cooling at 2.2 degrees Celsius since 1987. It seems that even the researchers will focus on one area and not the other. Certainly the arctic is warming slowly, but at the same time, the antarctic has been cooling at a rate of .12 degree Celsius per decade.
4. We’ve seen this all before. As I posted in a previous blog entry, Newsweek had a front-page article in the 70s about global cooling. They claimed that man was doing something to cause the earth to cool down and that if we didn’t do something, we’d enter a new ice age. Hmm… sounds familiar. They even saw the ice caps increase during this time, while automobiles were roaming the earth.
5. Pacific Decadal Oscillation. PDO is a theory that the earth naturally always experiences temperature shifts every 30-40 years.
6. This wonderful Atlanta winter. So, why should I complain? This winter has been beautiful!

I still haven’t seen Al Gore’s movie, and I definitely would be interested in catching it one day, but I get the strange suspicious that a lot of these facts are left out. Just a hunch. I’ll be waiting for a movie that has no agenda, but I find that very unlikely. Until then, sip up on your mojitos in the winter, and enjoy the natural cycles of the earth’s climate.

Keep watching til the end. Its worth it.