It's my 39th birthday, and I feel great.

It's been an amazing ride.

It gets better.

Got an interesting email. Checked it out on Snopes. Thought I would share it with you:

This is from a man, Bruce Vincent, from Montana who received an award from the President. He writes:

I've written the following narrative to chronicle the day of the award ceremony in DC. I'm still working on a press release but the White House press corps has yet to provide a photo to go with it. When the photo comes I'll ship it out. When you get done reading this you'll understand the dilemma I face in telling this story beyond my circle of close friends.

Stepping into the Oval Office, each of us was introduced to the President and Mrs. Bush. We shook hands and participated in small talk. When the President was told that we were from Libby, Montana, I reminded him that Marc Racicot is our native son and the President offered his warm thoughts about Governor Racicot. I have to tell you, I was blown away by two things upon entering the office.

First, the Oval Office sense of 'place' is unreal. The President later shared a story of Russian President Putin entering the room prepared to tackle the President in a tough negotiation and upon entering the atheist muttered his first words to the President and they were 'Oh, my God.'

I concurred. I could feel the history in my bones. Second, the man that inhabits the office engaged me with a firm handshake and a look that can only be described as penetrating. Warm, alive, fully engaged, disarmingly penetrating. I was admittedly concerned about meeting the man. I think all of us have an inner hope that the most powerful man in our country is worthy of the responsibility and authority that we bestow upon them through our vote.

I admit that part of me was afraid that I would be let down by the moment - that the person and the place could not meet the lofty expectations of my fantasy world. This says nothing about my esteem for President Bush but just my practical realization that reality may not match my 'dream'.

Once inside the office, President Bush got right down to business and, standing in front of his desk, handed out the awards one at a time while posing for photos with the winners and Mrs. Bush. With the mission accomplished, the President and Mrs. Bush relaxed and initiated a lengthy, informal conversation about a number of things with our entire small group. He and the First Lady talked about such things as the rug in the office. It is traditionally designed by the First Lady to make a statement about the President, and Mrs. Bush chose a brilliant yellow sunburst pattern to reflect 'hope'.

President Bush talked about the absolute need to believe that with hard work and faith in God there is every reason to start each day in the Oval Office with hope.

He and the First Lady were asked about the impact of the Presidency on their marriage and, with an arm casually wrapped around Laura, he said that he thought the place may be hard on weak marriages but that it had the ability to make strong marriages even stronger and that he was blessed with a strong one.

After about 30 or 35 minutes, it was time to go. By then we were all relaxed and I felt as if I had just had an excellent visit with a friend. The President and First Lady made one more pass down the line of awardees, shaking hands and offering congratulations. When the President shook my hand I said, 'thank you Mr. President and God bless you and your family.'

He was already in motion to the next person in line, but he stopped abruptly turned fully back to me, gave me a piercing look, renewed the vigor of his handshake and said, 'Thank you and God bless you and yours as well.'

On our way out of the office we were to leave by the glass doors on the west side of the office. I was the last person in the exit line. As I shook his hand one final time, President Bush said, 'I'll be sure to tell Marc hello and give him your regards.'

I then did something that surprised even me. I said to him, 'Mr. President, I know you are a busy man and your time is precious. I also know you to be a man of strong faith and have a favor to ask you.'

As he shook my hand he looked me in the eye and said, 'Just name it.'

I told him that my step-Mom was at that moment in a hospital in Kalispell, Montana, having a tumor removed from her skull and it would mean a great deal to me if he would consider adding her to his prayers that day.

He grabbed me by the arm and took me back toward his desk as he said, 'So that's it. I could tell that something is weighing heavy on your heart today. I could see it in your eyes. This explains it.'

From the top drawer of his desk he retrieved a pen and a note card with his seal on it and asked, 'How do you spell her name?' He then jotted a note to her while discussing the importance of family and the strength of prayer. When he handed me the card, he asked about the surgery and the prognosis. I told him we were hoping that it is not a recurrence of an earlier cancer and that if it is they can get it all with this surgery.

He said, 'If it's okay with you, we'll take care of the prayer right now. Would you pray with me?'

I told him yes and he turned to the staff that remained in the office and hand motioned the folks to step back or leave. He said, 'Bruce and I would like some private time for a prayer.'

As they left he turned back to me and took my hands in his. I was prepared to do a traditional prayer stance - standing with each other with heads bowed. Instead, he reached for my head with his right hand and pulling gently forward, he placed my head on his shoulder. With his left arm on my mid back, he pulled me to him in a prayerful embrace.

He started to pray softly. I started to cry. He continued his prayer for Loretta and for God's perfect will to be done. I cried some more. My body shook a bit as I cried and he just held tighter. He closed by asking God's blessing on Loretta and the family during the coming months.

I stepped away from our embrace, wiped my eyes, swiped at the tears I'd left on his shoulder, and looked into the eyes of our president. I thanked him as best I could and told him that me and my family would continue praying for he and his.

As I write this account down and reflect upon what it means, I have to tell you that all I really know is that his simple act left me humbled and believing. I so hoped that the man I thought him to be was the man that he is. I know that our nation needs a man such as this in the Oval Office. George W. Bush is the real deal. I've read Internet stories about the President praying with troops in hospitals and other such uplifting accounts. Each time I read them I hope them to be true and not an Internet perpetuated myth. This one, I know to be true. I was there. He is real. He has a pile of incredible stuff on his plate each day - and yet he is tuned in so well to the here and now that he 'sensed' something heavy on my heart. He took time out of his life to care, to share, and to seek God's blessing for my family in a simple man-to-man, father-to-father, son-to-son, husband-to-husband, Christian-to-Christian prayerful embrace. He's not what I had hoped he would be. He is, in fact, so very, very much more.

The other day at the movie theater I ordered my standard movie theater drink, 3 parts diet coke, 1 part mr. pibb.

I got a blank stare on the mr. pibb part.

"Three parts diet coke and 1 part what?"

"Mr. Pibb."

"Oh. Pibb. Right. OK."

------------------

Yes, I do remember when ... Coca Cola changed "Mr. Pibb" to just "Pibb xtra."

And apparently, that means I'm getting old.

It was like the reverse of that scene in Back to the Future (yes, I remember that movie too) where Marty McFly tries to order a Pepsi free, then a Tab ... then just something without any sugar in it. (A non sequitur that I recall bugging me every time I watched that movie - did that bug anyone else?).

The other night I ate at Don Bravo again ... it's amazing how you can't get Tex Mex food this good anywhere else but Alief, of all places. (Sort of in between Houston and Sugarland). Looks like some other people like it too ...

I don't know why, but I feel like celebrating this today. 102 days as a non smoker.  And my life insurance is up for renewal. Today I'll be talking to my life insurance agent to get revised life insurance. I need to look at term vs. investment policy. If anyone has a strong opinion about that please feel free to post.

Wow! The software I've been using in my carputer for a few years has now been integrated into a full integrated turnkey GPS device. Looking at the screenshots, it appears to be the exact same software I use.

I wonder if the people who buy the integrated turnkey device get to upgrade when version 4 of the iGuidance software comes out.

I'll tell you one thing for sure ... that screen isn't anywhere near that bright with the convertible top down.

Among a group of friends I used to travel with was a really fun guy named Heath. One of the things that made Heath so fun to hang out with was that behind his relatively quiet, almost shy exterior, was hidden a mischevious prankster, an alter ego we named “Keith.” Sometimes a newcomer would be on the trip and we’d mention Keith, as if he was there, and the newcomer, working hard to learn everyone’s names, would ask “who’s Keith?” and the simple answer was that “Keith” was “Heath’s evil twin.”

It was funny, because although “Keith” was mischevious, he seemed to share Heath’s heart of gold, so his pranks were always in good humor and never executed with intent to harm a person or push them beyond their ability to cope.

Unfortunately, we all have another evil twin, and he’s no clown. Every one of us. It’s a genetic trait, passed down from our first ancestors, who, given the choice, rebelled against their creator’s directive and took for themselves the trait of knowing good and evil. It was the original “end of the innocence.” (One could say that before they did this they only knew good, but apparently did not recognize its value, for lack of a knowledge of the alternative. But that’s another mystery altogether that I won’t dive into today).

So we are all born with this alternative little god inside that we’ll call “little g.” He is so human, and so clever. Usually he is way too clever to do something as obvious as claiming the big G title, he plays happy with the little g title and just tries to minimize every issue possible so it can fall into the little g domain. When he succeeds, he ends up with the lion’s share of choices falling into his domain, essentially assigning him “big G” power with none of the accountability that would normally accompany that title.

Another friend of mine named Bill has a great word for what the Evil Twin does – it forages. The rich character of this word is that it suggests a hunter-gatherer kind of animal that will jump into dumpters, invade houses, or pretty much go anywhere or do anything, usually choosing the easiest course of action, to get food without much regard to the big picture effects of its actions.  The word picture suggested might be a cat, while foraging for food, jumping onto a counter to grab something that looks like a tasty meal, knocking over a $10,000 ancient urn containing its owners’ great grandfather’s ashes, causing its owner a load of pain and sorrow.

In a cat, we excuse this behavior. In a human, we excuse this kind of behavior too, right before, and sometimes even after, it happens, as long as the human was us, someone really close to us, or someone we have something to gain from defending.

Separate the perpetrator from us just a little more, though, and we get ugly pretty quickly, and right and wrong seem to become really clear, especially if it was our urn with our ancestors ashes, or sometimes even worse yet, it’s our butt that’s gonna pay the price for someone else’s stupid urn that got broken.

Yeah, that good for nothing, irresponsible, jerk is just common public enemy #1.

So today I’d like to introduce you to public enemy #1, also known as little g, a.k.a. the evil twin. Little g has a lot of promises for us. He will get us what we need. Remember the list of things that we say feel like love? Little g’s got it in the bag. Go with his plan and he’ll not only take care of you, he’ll take care of you now. Such a deal.

The problem is, even when little g succeeds, we discover that the list is incomplete. Little g only knows how to get us something that feels or looks like love, but over time, what little g gets us proves to be an impostor, usually leaving us more hungry for love than ever.

This is where little g proves really clever because the next thing we know he’s wormed his way out of all responsibility for the letdown, and has us following him on another fool’s mission with even more intensity than before, often with more at stake.

One of little g’s favorite tactics is to assign responsibility for the whole situation to big G. Big G takes the fall for our decision to follow little g’s direction. But who made that choice? We did. Time after time. Sometimes despite the best of logic, and sometimes just because little g keeps us focused on the little picture, minimizing the recognized consequences of our actions.

If you’ve ever tried to dig a tunnel, or even a hole of some kind using a hand shovel, you may have experienced a version of what happens next. See, the tunnel or hole usually starts wide, but over time, it gets narrow. The digger runs into obstacles and just gets plain tired from the effort, and the hole or tunnel gets more and more narrow as you go down, until it becomes a very confined space. And that’s exactly what happens to our consideration of others as we dig little g’s rabbit hole deeper and deeper. Our focus gets more and more narrowly focused on me. My needs. My wants. My preferences. We deferred the good of mankind to some future resolution in time, as soon as I get mine, and as the hole gets narrower and narrower we even defer the good of those closest to us, too. After all, they’ll get plenty of what they need just as soon as I get mine. Right?

Usually a lot of people end up getting hurt by the time we reach the realization that it’s not working. That’s what happened with me. If you’ve read my stories, you know how I hurt people in my search for self gratification, my years of foraging for love. You can see it in how I tried to gain the approval of others to achieve a platform for sowing a good influence. You can see it in how I moved from relationship to relationship in the search for a life long mate, with less and less caution, lower and lower expectations, and less and less respect for the rent-to-own soul of the week. You can see it in how I moved so fluidly from honoring and cherishing one relationship, to getting one “love” attribute from this one, while secretly getting another “love” attribute from this other one.

I don’t think I even need to go into a discussion of what effect this narrowly focused selfish obsession with “doing it my way” has on the human race.

Getting rescued from the evil twin requires more than just calling out “oh God.” It starts with that, but then it requires taking his hand. That’s right, we take the hand of big G, the “bad guy,” the one we blamed for everything while we took matters into our own hands, and now he’s the one to come to the rescue.

Who else would do this but a father? Who else has that kind of love? Well, in this case, our rescuer is also a son, named Jesus, who shared and perfectly represented the Father’s love as he died on the cross to shoulder all the blame for our decision to follow little g’s plans. Does this kind of selfless giving, so representative of the Father’s radically different kind of love, sound familiar? It should, because it’s also who you are called to be! You are called to represent this radical brand of love in your very own life.

Of course, we can let go of our father’s hand at any time, and follow the little g path again, for a minute, a day, a week, or longer, but for however long we’ve taken the father’s hand, we recognize the troublemaking counterfeit a little easier. Not only that, but from the moment we call out to big G, the creator God, the father, our rescuer, a powerful connection is made.

Have you had enough of the damage caused by relating to others from the little g perspective, the one that gives to get, the one that keeps identifying winners (people who can do a great job of meeting our needs), taking them in and unravelling their layers until you find their inner loser, or they find yours, or both? Are you starting to wonder if maybe the problem is everybody? Are you starting to realize that might include you?

The good news is that the creator God – the father – and his son Jesus – have already made all the arrangements for your rescue from the little g. All you have to do is call out for his help and take his hand.

I’ve always had a little problem with written prayers, and I’m not sure this is much better, but I’m going to recommend you let your own soul come up with its prayer, just include the following:

• That you trust and accept that Jesus, the only one who never dug a hole for himself, is the one standing at the opening who can pull you out
• That you trust and accept that he arranged a just and complete pardon and rescue by dying on the cross and rising again
• That you take his hand and welcome him to live in you and guide you through what needs to be done next
• That you trust your destiny to him and accept his adoption into his family known as the church

If that’s too complicated, just meet up with someone you know that you feel demonstrates the kind of selfess qualities I described toward the end of  Meet the Real You. Ask your questions. Get satisfactory answers. You’re not going to understand everything; just find a way to understand enough to take the leap of faith. Some things, you know, don’t make sense until you experience them for yourself.

After all ... if all this ends up being imaginary, what have you lost??

“Wake up. Who are you, and what do you want?”

For over a year. No mercy. No reprieve. I could go to bed each night knowing that in the morning, I would hear this voice, these words, in my head, again. Not from a child, or a spouse, or a guest … no, there was no physical being I could convince or coerce to stop asking these two questions.

It was a lonely time; I felt seperated, emotionally and spiritually, from everyone. I felt that no one I knew was going through what I was. Yet to the voice, to this reliable companion in my head, my response was always the same: “I don’t know, I don’t care, and neither do you. Nobody does, really. It’s just a game. I’m not playing. Go away. Leave me alone.”

- - -

I remembered hearing God when I was younger. Being with him. I remembered the day I was in this beautiful place, part of this huge crowd of people singing songs to him: songs about how he was so great, so loving. I remembered adding on my favorite “and,” as I always would, in my head as I sung these songs to him,  “… and I am such a scumbag. So undeserving. So evil. Do you remember where you found me, Jesus? What I had done? What I liked doing? How people hated me? What a desperate loser I was? All the disgusting things I did that make you cry?”

It was my celebration. This was how I celebrated God’s goodness. Re-living, re-feeling, re-hashing, re-bashing who I was when God found me and rescued me. And one day, with no warning, he answered with a shocking vision.

In my vision there was a flower pot, maybe with a dead flower in it. I barely grasped what it was when it flew past me and crashed against the wall, breaking into a hundred pieces and making this huge mess. Definitely not salvageable … not without some serious stupidity, anyway.

I had just about decided I had lost my mind, was halucinating and needed water, when suddenly understanding fell on me like the instant relief you feel when you can’t remember a word you need to finish a sentence, and someone else reminds you of the word.

First, I knew the flower pot was me. Wot???

Then, I knew it was the old me. The one I kept dragging out to celebrate that God had saved me from it.

I don’t remember if it was an audible voice, even in my head, but the understanding, in whatever form it came, was definitely God’s voice, and he said:

“Stop bringing the same old things to me over and over again. Those things are gone. They are no longer yours. They are no longer you. I don’t want them. We have new things to do.”

And so he cut me loose from the shame of my past. He knew things would get ugly now, and he knew he was big enough to handle it, too.

Freed from the religious chains that had kept me bringing my old pond scum to Jesus over and over, I felt enlightened, I felt certified … and unfortunately for me, I felt free to live in selfish arrogance. I became, in my own eyes, the righteous man. The one whose example others should follow, the one who looked really good. You know, the one who never missed church unless he was deathly ill, the one who stood strong and confident and didn’t need the help of others. I was on staff at a church, I was above reproach, and I made sure I stayed above reproach.

So when things started to go wrong in my relationship with my wife, of course, I didn’t seek any help from anyone. Instead, I turned up the heat at home. Full of arrogance and pride, and completely dead to the concept of grace, my response to my wife’s troubles and weaknesses started to sound like “Why can’t you be more like this? Why can’t you be more like [that person] who does [this or that] perfectly? Why can’t you be more like me? Snap out of it and get with the program!”

And one day, predictably, reality came crashing in. My wife had had enough. I was faced with a choice. My marriage was about to disolve. If it did, all my posturing would be revealed for what it was, and I would lose someone who I could vaguely remember was once very precious to me … and something from deep inside told me that underneath all the layers of arrogance and pride, she still was very precious to me. And to keep her in my life, I was going to have to drop most of the things in my life that made me look good to the people whose opinion I cared about, and extend grace and unconditional love to her, for a very long time.

It was so confusing, really, thinking I was “all that,” and seeing now I was going to have to eat all that for breakfast, lunch, dinner, desert, and midnight snack. My defences were up so high that I didn’t feel like I could hear from God at all. But I asked him what I should do, and I wasn’t sure I heard anything, but I did come away from that prayer with a strong realization: if I was really anything like Jesus, I would trade ministry, reputation, respect, and sometimes the right to claim being right, to restore relationship with the one(s) I loved. So that was my decision. I gritted my teeth and moved forward with a repetitive prayer: God help me.

Over the next few years, and a lot of pain as I cut off all these pieces of “how great I am,” even though I hated it, and more and more I hated that question that wouldn’t go away, I finally discovered what I’d been looking for. How to change the world. How to set things right. How to get people to stop hurting each other. How to free people from mediocrity. How to experience closer intimacy.  How to experience heart pounding, totally overwhelming joy and fullfillment. It had nothing to do with maintaining a stellar reputation, nothing to do with impressing anyone with how great I was. It had everything to do with loving like God loves at any time, whether it impressed anyone or not.

Through all this, I learned the answer to that question that hounded me for so long. One day I answered that question, and it went away and never came back:

I am a creation of the living God, created to enjoy relationship with him and reveal his image by walking with him in a life of loving togetherness with others. Hand in hand with him, I reveal the life changing power of his radically unique love by extending it to others. I am unique and irreplaceable, a powerful, effective one-of-a-kind combination including a specific personality and specific gifts, placed into life at this specific time to give and receive the blessings of relationship and truth with all those I share this short time with.

And that, my friend, is the real you, too.

This means that a lot of the time we are not who we think we are supposed to make ourselves out to be. And much of the time we are not the people others have made us out to be, either. We are, in fact, who the creator God has made us out to be: his ambassadors, his representatives, his workers, and his children. He has chosen to accomplish his work in this world, in this period in time, through us.

---

Maybe your life isn’t looking anything like that now. Maybe you don’t even see any compelling reason to want your life to look anything like that. Maybe you feel like it’s all you can do to make ends meet and keep yourself from getting shafted every day. Maybe you feel, like I did, that the world hasn’t really given you what you deserve yet – the good or the bad.

In that case, you have a very important place here in this community of people whose hearts have been captured by that radically unique love, this place called the church: we want to help make your world a better place. We want to be the friend who is there for you no matter what. Try us, and if you find we’re being posers, like I was, call us on it, because (as I discovered) we really don’t want to stay there. We want to be the ones who lend a helping hand when we have nothing to gain from it except maybe, if you decide you like it, a relationship where you start doing that and sharing some of that one-of-a-kind you with us and others. And yeah, we’re hoping you’ll be totally hooked.

As we walk through life with him, we actually stumble onto clues to our purpose in unexpected places … places like a very ironically enlightened bumper sticker that appeared a few years back:

GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD. NO EXCEPTIONS.

When we read something like that, we hear an answer inside. It says “OK!! Let’s go.”

I'm working on the follow up to "Unfailing Love" ... and with any luck, "Meet the Real You" will be up by tomorrow.

I sometimes run into folks who are surprised that the total cost on my custom "twisty ripper" *** configuration is comparable to, say, the price of a good used Camry. So here's my write up on that: if you want it, save your pennies and go get one.

*** (A "twisty ripper" is a car designed for driving fast on particularly twisty roads such as mountain roads, e.g. the Tail of the Dragon in Tennessee, Lime Creek Road in Austin, The Pig Trails in Arkansas, etc. etc.).

How to get your own super fast mid engine sports car for under $16 grand:

More than 20 owners of this exact configuration confirm that this is an extremely fast and agile car - arguably the best twisty-road car possible for under $20 grand, all for about $16 grand, about the same price as a 2005-2006 used Camry. But unlike the used Camry, you'll have a brand new engine block, totally removing concerns about the most expensive hidden used car flaw: overheated, warped blocks.

For a more aggressive looking stance and even better handling you can switch to a Sportivo suspension or Tien S-Tech lowering springs with Koni Adjustable Sport shocks, either of which lower the car 1.5 to 2 inches. This adds about $1000 to $1500 to the cost, and if you're planning to do it up front, you might disregard the need to test the suspension before buying your base car, which might save you enough on that to pay for the suspension upgrade.

If you're planning to drive your base car as is for a while before doing the engine upgrade, and it is a 2000 or 2001 model, be sure to have your mechanic remove the pre-cats. This will cost under $150. These are small inserts in the stock headers that help reduce emissions, but they are of questionable longevity on the 2000 or 2001 models (the 2002-2006 model precats are fine). This is the only known major issue on the MR2 Spyder, and gutting the precats completely solves the problem.

Don't forget the Yamaha Badge to complete the obfuscation.