Good Stuff!

Mark 8

33 Turning and seeing his disciples wavering, wondering what to believe, Jesus confronted Peter. “Peter, get out of my way! Satan, get lost! You have no idea how God works.”
34 Calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how.
35 Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self.
36 What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you?
37 What could you ever trade your soul for?

Some good bible readings tonight, just had a odd night, friend’s server had some hacking done, which of course makes me a tad uneasy to say the least as for them it is 1 server, for me it’s 4, and 2 others which I manage - so needless to say I am wrapping up the night with some good time in prayer, and bible time.

This verse above hit home, reading it in The Message really did take it from the more “classic” memory of it “Get thee behind me Satan!” and make it hit home even more - lately at some level I have lacked on my work, the things God has blessed me with, I have been putting off some changes because part of me feels ready to do them, another is worried about losses, issues, errors, things essientally out of my control - aka trying to keep myself in the driver’s seat, as the message so quaintly translated it.

For over 6 years of business I have kept busy, late nights, long days, sometimes never seeing friends, etc. many reasons I could go into as to why, but if you read my blog on a semi-regular basis, you’ll know my problems with Anxiety, various secret sins, etc. recently things have flipped in realm of priority, and a plan formmed up so awesome, I was moving forward with it, till business got busy, lots of clients chimmed in needing me on projects, etc. Well as of 5 minutes ago, I am on a project freeze, I need to finish what I have on hand, and I need to start moving clients slowly but surely from their current servers, to ones managed by an outside source - I love working on servers, it has gave me great joy these past 6 years, but the bottom line is, it’s a stress I don’t see as a priority - by that I mean I can’t keep up - this company can, they have proven themselves to me hosting some test sites, no outages, no visible hacks, no issues.

Could I keep hosting my own servers, do all the management? I suppose so, and I am praying about keeping 1 server max, and having a backup DNS server here in Bakersfield (if the issues with the office line levels out - more on that another day) - but my priorities have shifted, what was once a desire to hide away, work, work, work - as the scripture said:

What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you?

That is so true, I have gotten a lot of things, I have fun toys, great gadgets, and technology galore, but it’s only been in stepping out of this work lime-light that I have truly had a chance to live, be me again, hang out with friends, work on projects of personal nature, heck see more of the carpet in my bedroom and office than I have in years (not entirely clean yet, but still working on it) and enjoying music again, taking real time to sing in the car at the top of my lungs, and get them (my lungs) back in shape, so who knows - the thought alone of not worrying about outages, crashes, hacks, etc. peace of mind and then some, which is definately key in taking a road trip as I’d be at times without net access, so I’d hate to be on the road in the middle of Oregon and find out “3 servers are down!”

So, simplify life is my plan, stop focusing on what I want, and really strive towards what God wants, now that my Anxiety is less than it has been in several years (PTL!) I think it’s time to plug back in at a church, not sure where, maybe with the rents, maybe somewhere with none of my family about. Time will tell, but as we hit this Easter weekend, and for Christians remember the sacrafice Christ made on the cross, trading his life for ours, and defeating death, it’s just a good time to really reflect and re-grasp the gifts God has for us on His path - may be ruff sometimes, but as many scriptures and many musical tunes have noted never said it’d be easy, just said we’d never be alone - or as a more modern artist has recently recorded and brought mainstream “Jesus take the wheel”

That’s all I got for this evening, which was to be waffles at denny’s at midnight, but instead turned into a awesome evening all the same! (I still love you Jake & Matt) - Today will bring about getting my Taxes done, as well as some other misc. work towards writing up to clients about the change, and praying more on keeping a core server for SSL clients (shopping carts, etc.) and getting the ball rolling for next week to move forward on all of this. God is Good! Thanks for reading.