Statue of Liberty and us

Ellis Island Immigrant Museum. Who let them in?

Smiling because it was our first meal in 24 hours.

Times Square

St. Patricks Cathedral

More later

Long Beach, Long Island, NY on a deserted beach, and for good reason! It was cold and windy!

There is more than one way to play connect 4

A team from Fellowship Bible did some renovation work for a ministry that works in a rundown part of Philly.

We went to the Holocost Museum and then we were going to go to the Smithsonian but after a morning of learning about the Holocost, we didn’t want to learn anything more. So we did a whirlwind tour of the Whitehouse, Library of Congress, Capitol building and Commerce building.

Commerce Hall or Chamber of Commerce… I can’t remember which. Anybody know?
Capitol Building. We got some passes to go inside the building. It was a maze of hallways and was very confusing to get around. I was surprised that we were able to get in.

The Library of Congress. This was an amazing piece of architecture. We were not allowed into the main study area.

The Mellon Hotel, right next the the Whitehouse. I got a clue as to the kind of guest stay here when a guy was complaining at the front desk about the lack of a shoe shining service in the room.

The International Spy Museum. It was an amazing museum. I now know how to make microdots from cellophane and alcaseltzer. Very useful information.

Lincolns Monument.

National Air & Space Museum. The X2 is above us.
The Korean War memorial.

The Vietnam Memorial. Nate served with the US Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This weekend I attended an urban ministry conference in Chester, PA. (close to Philly)

Here are some pictures from Highland Gardens in Chester.

A typical unit in the hood. I heard that an empty lot in this area sold for 1000 USD.

Many houses are abandoned which creates many social problems. Imagine kids with nothing to do and no family to speak of having any number of empty houses to meet in and make trouble.

Some kids playing b-ball. Only 21 % of the families in Chester consist of a husband and wife living together. 32% are single mothers and the rest are classified as ‘non-families’… not sure what that means.

The ministry, World Impact is doing some good work in this area. The need is huge. It is the missionfield on our doorstep. You can check them out here: http://www.worldimpact.org/

Here are just a few pics from the college & career group at church

Been challenged by these lines in a book by DA Carson, ‘A Call to Spiritual Reformation’,

The one thing we most urgently need in Western Christendom is a deeper knowledge of God. We need to know God better. When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted. So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs-and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfillment. God simply becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities… In the biblical view of things, a deeper knowledge of God brings with it massive improvement in the other areas mentioned: purity, integrity, evangelistic effectiveness, better study of Scripture, improved private and corporate worship, and much more. But if we seek these things without passionately desiring a deeper knowledge of God, we are selfishly running after God’s blessings without running after him. We are even worse than the man who wants his wife’s services- someone to come home to, someone to cook and clean, someone to sleep with-without ever making the effort really to know and love his wife and discover what she wants and needs; we are worse than such a man, I say, because God is more than any wife, more than the best of wives: he is perfect in his love, he has made us for himself, and we are answerable to him.

One of the foundational steps in knowing God, and one of the basic demonstrations that we do know God, is prayer-spiritual, persistent, biblically minded prayer. Writing a century and a half ago, Robert Murray M’Cheyne declared, “What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is, and no more.”

I just got these pics from China. The Tab furniture has shippped!

Out of curiosity I looked up the ship and found this picture – the CSCL Rotterdam

The container arrives in Seattle on Feb 5.