Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Last Week of Summer

So! Life is moved past summer and into the full swing of the school year. Sad, but its ok because its my last semester of school! I am going to be graduating in December! YAY!!! I'm very excited. Although, I suppose its not my last semester, I will be going back for grad school, but its at least the end of my Bachelors!

Our end of summer has been busy but fun. I finished my online college algebra class with a B! That is quite an accomplishment for me! I'm horrible at math, and so I'm very proud of myself for pulling off a B in college algebra after seven years of not doing math at all. Mike finished his computer class with an A, so he is happy about that! We went to his parents' house to chill and swim on Sunday, and to enjoy our last day before school starts.


It was relaxing and better that staying in our apartment all afternoon! I also decided to use the ice cream maker we got for our wedding, so I made vanilla bean gelato this week. Yummy!!!!! I'll never have to buy ice cream again!

I started training at the Woman to Woman Pregnancy Resource Center, which is where I'm doing my internship for this fall. It is so exciting for me, because I have had a passion to work with women in crisis pregnancies for years, but the timing has never been right for me to be able to! But now I'm getting to go through the advocate training, I'm getting to mentor girls and women who come in, and I'm learning to trust God even when the women don't decide to carry their babies. Its a struggle, but this is so amazing to see God use these circumstances to bring women to Him.

Mike started school last week, and he officially has more than 700 pages to read this semester for all his classes. Its a crazy amount of reading, but it is ALWAYS like that!

We're not sure if we are going to keep our new cat, Moose. We may need to return him to his previous owners because Camma (our original cat) just doesn't get along with him. They fight all the time, and she stays under our bed most of the time. We don't want her to be quarantined in our bedroom for the rest of her life! It sucks, because look at Moose:


He's just so darn cute! So playful and lovey! Although in this pic, you can see he is trying to move away from my kisses!

In any case, we hope it will change, but it doesn't look that way.

I promised in my last post to put pics of Mike's portrait he is painting, so here is the progress! He is holding up his beginning next to the portrait of me he painted last year, because he wants to hang them up next to each other in our living room.


More progress...



I love watching him paint! Its so crazy - he is really talented, and its a passion he has. You can kind of see three other paintings he's done in the picture below.



And, the finished painting (minus the background - I don't have a picture of that yet)!


My birthday is in August, so we went out to eat at a fancy Italian restaurant called Amiando's off Beltline, and this is before we left. I had my hair fixed all crazy, so I wanted to get a pic of it.


That's pretty much it! I started school yesterday, Mike started school last week, so we may be updating pretty sparsely now... But thanks for reading!

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

HARVEY DENT, BATMAN, AND JESUS



Okay, so Stacey and I went to see The Dark Knight on Saturday. The movie was really good, really, really dark but good. So dark in fact that Stacey couldn't really enjoy it. I liked it however. But this post is not a review... it has nothing to do with the quality of the film, plot, or actors.

If you have not seen this movie and plan to do so. DON'T READ THE REST OF THIS POST. We're off the edge of the map mate, here be spoilers....



Joker is the Villain of this flick. He is an insane, mentally deranged fiend who helplessly warps Harvey Dent, Gotham City's white knight. Harvey is Martin Luther King in the beginning of the film, and a Klansman near the end. The whole movie he is trying to prove his acceptability to the masses by locking away criminals, but his actions have only produced more desperate and violent terror on the streets of Gotham. Half-way through the movie, Dent crosses a line. He wants to destroy the joker but seeks to do so by beating a schizophrenic man for information. Later his will and mind are broken when the love of his life is blown to bits as he is saved and listens to her. In the hospital Joker convinces him that his friends are really to blame and he goes on a killing spree on everyone involved in the death of his love. Harvey is killed in the end but rather than allow him to be condemned, Batman takes the blame for Harvey's crimes. All this even after Dent has tried to kill him. Dent, although it's not revealed, survives but lives as the infamous 2face, his white knight persona dies. Now Batman carries the blame for Dent's actions, Dent lives by reputation a saint, but actually a villain.

Isn't this slightly reminiscent of what Jesus has done for us? Our souls have been corrupted by the enemy of God, Satan. We are both victims and hopeless villains, but Christ will not let us die without making us as saints. So our old self dies, we live on with a flawless reputation and continually vile actions, always protected by the escape goat of Christ. Of course we are indwelt with the Holy Spirit of God who continually works in us to sanctify us until the day that Christ returns to claim us, where Harvey just denigrates further into madness. Thank God for the anti-curse! The Remedy of Satan's corruption, that is redemption in Christ for all those who believe.