Thanksgiving, temptation and chainsaw work.

Those three words in the headline are all pretty far apart. At first glance you might not see how they are linked and in many ways they are not. But they are all things that I have delt with in the last weekend.

First off lets start with the chainsaw part. We spent this last thanksgiving (Canadian) up at hyas lake at the Schumachers(inlaw's) cabin. It was a really fun and relaxing weekend, it consisted of getting some reading done, lots of really good food and building a railing. Building is something that is pretty natural for me, but this was the first time I had ever built with logs and a chain saw. Went out and found a fallen tree we wanted to use and lugged it back to the cabin, peeled the bark off of it and cut it to length.
  We did a half cut on it to make it sit half on half of the deck, then drilled holes into it and attached two similar but small trees to make the cross members. It was actually alot of fun and looked pretty good, it was for sure a unique way of building that I have not done before so enjoyed it but as others could attest to, I could for sure use some practice at it :-)
  Over all a good weekend and I am truly and utterly thankful for the family that I have up here. To have there support and love means alot.

  Thankgiving is interesting this year for me. I have always celebrated both American and Canadian Thanksgiving before. But this year it is abit different. For a few things, I am actually living in canada, all my friends up here are Canadian, and I think the biggest difference is the landscape. As you may or may not know, Canadian thankgiving was today, Oct 8th. and US Thanksgiving is later, Nov 22nd this year I believe. So with the combination of the difference in time, and also the landscape around me thanksgiving has looked alot different this year.

 Now on to the temptation end. Interesting subject. We started a new bible study lately and we have been going through Mathew. We are jumping into chapter 4 and in that it goes through the temptation of Jesus. One thing that stood out as I read through it and spent time studying it was that in the second temptation situation. Satan actually quotes scripture. This struck me as a interesting fact, I still want to do some more research into it but I still don't know in which ways Satan can use scripture. I don' thtink he can use it in a correct way. I believe that if he does use it, he would use it out of context, or change it to fit his will.
 But as I said, I want to do more research into this. But the point of this story is the interesting facts that I ran into as I looked more into what temptation is. We view it as a negative thing, as a struggle or hard time. But before the 17th century, temptation could have many meanings, yes, negative was one of them but there were also many positive ones. It was talked about more as a testing, as a thing you would come up against to show the strength of our faith. It was not always a bad thing, not easy, but not always bad.

This got me thinking as I was looking over my life during this thankgiving time and found myself with the understanding that we should be thankful for the temptation. And even as I write this it does not sound like I should be. But I do think that it is true when come to the understanding of temptation in a deeper way then just something we struggle with. If nothing else it is something to ponder, something to think about and for me has been a attitude shift in my thinking on temptation. It also gives me the freedom to make every effort to grow and learn from it, since I know it can be used for his glory.


So. As I am finishing up my peanut butter nutter bar, and thinking about heading to bed. I think I will light up my pipe (tobacco that is) go sit on the porch, ponder something and over all, just be thankful.
Thankful for the many, many good things in my life, but also to the best of my ability, the temptations in my life.

Thank you for reading,

Christ in All.