Personal Chef!

Heidi & I had a Saladmaster sales couple come to our house last night and cook supper for us and 4 guests. We invited my sister and her husband and my mother and father-in-law, but my father-in-law was baling hay, so Wendi (my sister-in-law) came instead. Saladmaster is high-end cookware that uses super hard metals in there products to keep things from leaching into your food, cut cooking times, and retain the volume of your food. It was really interesting.

The meal was fabulous! He had fried chicken cooked with no water or oil, vegetables cooked with no water, mashed potatoes with the starch removed, and a chocolate cake made with no water, oil, or butter. It all turned out wonderful and tasted amazing!

We learned a lot about healthy cooking, and we learned a lot about unhealthy cooking. It's amazing how everything we need to run our bodies efficiently, God has provided in the food we eat. It's also amazing how much of those minerals and nutrients we cook out of our food before we eat it.

They claim that, with their cookware, you can:1. save about 70% on energy due to their high quality materials that distribute the heat faster and more evenly around the food.
2. cook healthier since the extreme hardness of their materials allows you to cook without adding water or oil to your food. The material also prevents leaching of chemicals and hazardous metals into your food. Our chef did a "taste test" regarding the leaching claim, and it was pretty amazing/scary how nasty our pans made the water taste.
3. Cuts cooking times by up to 50%. All-in-all, if you're in the market for some new cookware, and healthy cooking is a high priority for you, it's worth looking into.

One Year!

Today God has blessed Heidi and I with one full year of marriage! Looking back over the past year, I can't imagine a better helpmate than the one God has provided in Heidi. She has blessed me, stretched me, inspired me, and loved me more than I dared to hope she would.

She does her best to understand me, and when she can't, she accepts me. When I fail her, she forgives me. When I succeed, she praises me.

She respects me unconditionally, even when I don't deserve it. She supports me in my bumbling attempts to be the husband God calls me to be. She helps to pick me up and brush me off when I fall down. She laughs at my jokes and listens to my engineering "explanations" of the world. She even seems to be interested sometimes. :-)

I love her more every day, and I thank God for blessing us with a beautiful relationship.

A New Opportunity

I recently set up a blog for our mission team in Ixtlan, MX. It's not completely finished, but it's done enough that I think we can start utilizing it for updates and prayer requests. Let me know, via the "email webmaster" link on the left side of the blog, if you have any suggestions or comments.

Ixtlan Mission Blog

I stand in awe

Amazing CGI visualization of molecular biology's central dogma. It shows animations of DNA coiling, replication, transcription and translation. It was created by Drew Berry of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.

Sunshine makes me brighter

This is the sort of day that makes me wonder why I wanted to have a desk job. It's 66 degrees, sunny, and windstill, and windstill almost never happens in Central Illinois.

But we do what we gotta do right?

So I'm inside looking over building plans that were hand-drawn in the 70's trying to figure out how they originally designed Southern Illinois Medical Instruction Building. I know, now most of you are probably jealous of me. It's ok.

But back the topic of the title of this post - what is it about sunshine that influences our moods so much? Why does it make a difference whether or not we can see a flaming ball of hydrogen gas that's over 93,000,000 miles away?

You know what I find really amazing? The fact that we can feel it from that distance. 93 MILLION miles away and we can feel the heat it radiates off it's surface. That's astounding.

And the God that created that sun, and trillions of others like it, wants to have a personal relationship with us...

Is that not amazing? His warmth can reach us on the cloudiest of days and the coldest of nights.

Praise Him

Fighting the Feeling

I have been battling a "case o


Ok, that first line is what I was typing when my boss called me into the conference room. I was going to write a post about how it's just been a depressing last several days, and try to use my writing to focus back on my blessings.

However, the reason they called me into the conference room was to give me a bonus check and to let me know that I've been doing a good job. I've been feeling kind of blah at work lately. We've had some things happen that have been kind of stressful for all of us and we've been really busy.

God's timing never ceases to amaze me. He comes through faithful time and time again, and yet each time it's like I'm seeing it for the first time. We serve such a good God. Hold fast to His promises that he lavishes upon us in His Word! He has our ETERNAL best in mind ALL the time. No exceptions. Not all the time except that one time that....whatever... God is ALWAYS working in us to achieve what is best for us eternally, and for that I am thankful.

Blessings.

Open House Today

FYI: Heidi and I are having an open house for our Condo today (Sunday) from 2pm-5pm.

Even if you're not interested in buying it, but have never been here, or even if you have, feel free to stop by. We'll have fresh baked bread and homemade jam.