Comments for Chris: FAIL.

So I was looking back over the blog tonight and kind of thinking through how much fun this year has been.  Jess and I really enjoy bloging.  We don't do it half as often as we'd like to, and I swear that I forget half of the really good ideas that I have - none the less a lot of fun is had by these two.

Then I noticed something.  My wife is a lot more popular than I am.

Mr. Hill - 14 comments.
Jessica Hill - 42 comments.

Wowser.  I know Jess is way cooler than I am, but that was still pretty brutal.

Hope you enjoy our silly writing selves as much as we enjoy popping away on the keys of our MacBooks.

Excitement brewing for the weekend.

Mr. Hill

P.S. - The Aggie Football team gives me heartbreak.

SHFP: William Wilberforce - Author and Statesman

This man has become one of my heroes.  Both a professed follower of Christ and leading politician of his day, William Wilberforce was a driving force behind the abolition of Britain's slave trade.

He wrote and published this book in the late 1700's, and I have found it's words to be equally as potent and applicable today as they must've been more than 200 years ago.  The book that I have quoted below, Wilberforce's A Practical View of Christianity,  has challenged my intellect (as Barbara Tuchman's book did), improved my writing (reading his writing is like playing basketball with Lebron...it's rough, but you get better), encouraged my dreams, and shown me that there truly is nothing new under the Sun when it comes to our fallen nature and struggle towards Jesus.

So, I challenge you to muddle your way through this passage as I have his book.  Keep a tab in your browser set to www.m-w.com and admit that your vocabulary is a little deficient (as I have found myself forced to).  Recognize how material and relevant Wilberforce's words are in 2010 as they were in 1797 - one of my favorite discoveries as I have read the book.

Most of all, I hope that you realize that in the same manner that Wilberforce had a professional calling as a politician but made a tremendous impact on the religious and moral standing of his country through his writing and life - so we can today.

No matter what profession you find yourself called to - engineer, accountant, sales, politics, stay at home mom - I guarantee that you can also have an impact for Christ on the culture around you.  Change for our great nation will not emanate from her government, but from normal men and women like us who are willing to follow Christ in a passionate and surrendered manner.

"There are many shades of difference between those who flatly renounce, and those who cordially embrace the doctrine of Redemption by Christ.  This class has a sort of general, indeterminate, and ill understood dependence on our blessed Savior.  But their hopes so far as they can be distinctly made out (for their views also are very obscure) appear ultimately to bottom on the persuasion that they are now, through Christ, become members of a new dispensation, wherein they will be tried by a more lenient rule than that to which they must have been otherwise subject.  'God will not now be extreme to mark what is done amiss: but will dispense with the rigorous exactions of his law, too strict indeed for such frail creatures as we are to hope that we can fulfill it.  Christianity has moderated the requisitions of Divine Justice; and all which is now required of us, is thankfully to trust o the merits of Christ for the pardon of our sins, and the acceptance of our sincere though imperfect obedience.  The frailties and infirmities to which our nature is liable, or to which our situation in life exposes us, will not be severely judged: as it is the practice that really determines the character, we may rest satisfied, that if on this whole our lives be tolerably good, we shall escape with little or no punishment, and through Jesus Christ our Lord, shall be finally partakers of heavenly felicity.'

"We cannot dive into the human heart, and therefore should always speak with caution and diffidence, when from external appearances or declarations we are affirming the existence of any internal principles and feelings; especially as we are liable to be misled by the ambiguities of language, or by the inaccuracy with which others may express themselves.  But is sometimes not difficult to anyone who is accustomed, if the phase may be allowed, to the anatomy of the human mind, to discern, that generally speaking, the persons who use the above language, rely not so much on the merits of Christ, and on the agency of Divine Grace, as on their own power of fulfilling the moderated requisitions of Divine Justice.  He will hence therefore discover in them a disposition rather to extenuate the malignity of their disease, than to magnify the excellence of the proffered remedy.  He will find them apt to palliate in themselves what they cannot fully justify, to enhance the merit of what they believe to be their good qualities and commendable actions, to set as it were in an account the good against the bad; and if the result be not very unfavorable, they conceive that they shall be entitled to claim the benefits of our Savior's sufferings as a thing of course.

"They have little ideas, so little, that it might almost be affirmed that they have no idea at all, of the importance or difficulty of the duty of what the Scripture calls "submitting ourselves to the righteousness of God" [Romans 10:3]; or of our proneness rather to justify ourselves in his sight, than in the language of imploring penitents to acknowledge ourselves guilty and helpless sinners They have never summoned themselves to this entire and unqualified renunciation of their own merits and their own strength; and therefore they remain strangers to the natural lostness of the human heart, which such a call would have awakened into action, and roused to resistance.  All these, their several errors, naturally result from the mistaken conception entertained of the fundamental principles of Christianity. They consider not that Christianity is a scheme "for justifying the ungodly" [Romans 4:5], by Christ's dying for them "when yet sinners" [Romans 5:6-8], a scheme "for reconciling us to God-when enemies" [Romans 5:10]; and for making the fruits of holiness the effects, not the cause, of our being justified and reconciled; that, in short, it opens freely the door of mercy, to the greatest and vilest of penitent sinners; that obeying the blessed impulse of the grace of God, whereby they had been awakened from the sleep of death, and moved to seek for pardon, they might enter in, and through the regenerating influence of the Holy Spirit might be enabled to bring forth the fruits of Righteousness." (Emphasis the authors)

Christmas Morning

The last two nights (for some unknown reason) I have been struggling to remain asleep beginning at sometime around 4ish in the morning.

This morning I managed to hack through it until sometime around 6:30, at which time I decided to bag it, get up, use my Christmas Eve iTunes Giftcards, drink some really good coffee, and enjoy the time leading up to the Jordan family Christmas this morning at 8.


If you're a friend of mine, you know that despite my occasionally gruff sounding, loud, excitable, and from time to time scruffy exterior there lies the heart of a big teddy bear.  This morning, the teddy bear is beating out the grizzly bear for the forefront of the mind's expression.

Lots of that would have to do with the fact that for whatever reason I woke up with this song in my head.

I am a sucker for that song.  Not particularly complicated.  Some would call it cheesy.  I really don't care.  I love it.

Lots of that love has to do with the fact that I have some really wonderful memories with my wife and that song.  Waltzing around the Chi-O parking lot, lying there this morning watching the sun come up on Christmas morning, driving around half of this state with her on wildly fun road trips.  I love how music brings memories and emotion into the most simple of things.

Another reason why the teddy bear is winning this morning is because I miss my family.  Yes, at the tender age of 24 I am experiencing the tears of my first Christmas away from home.  (My wife's came last year...she is way more brave and tough than I am.)  I miss you family.  Jess and I love our presents.  This has to be one of the most thoughtful sets of Christmas presents I have ever received - making this morning all the more difficult to be apart from you, Tige, the ranch, and the White Christmas that you are surrounded by.

Likely the final reason that I will disclose this morning for my teddy bear sneaking out this morning is that I am rather emotionally thinking about the gift of my Savior.  Wrapped as my presents but wrapped in a body of flesh, my Master became a man in order to die and bring me life.  Truthfully, it is difficult for me to talk or write about my Jesus without emotion springing into my eyes because He is the reason I am who I am.  He took away all of my hurt, bitterness, and sin setting me free to be who I always wanted to be - now for His Glory.  Fulfillment.

Merry Christmas, Friends.  God bless you on this most wonderful of days.

Mr. Hill

Desires fulfilled and Trees of Life.

I am literally brimming with excitement this morning.

Yes, brimming.

You see, in the last 3 days I have experienced the fulfillment of no fewer than three of my childhood/teenage dreams.

Yes, I am really serious about that.  Three in three days.

Jesus is really fun and exciting like that.

We'll take them in order of occurrence.  Saturday, Sunday, and Monday timing:

-SATURDAY-
Desire fulfilled: Preaching in a church.
        You have to understand, as I type that, I am crying.  That is a desire that has been so deep in my heart, so full of passion to teach and encourage God's people - It's really hard for me to express how much life there was in me when I walked over to the little podium.

       No, I didn't preach to thousands, it was just about 15 or 20 at my parents little country church in Childress, TX where our family's ranch is....Do you know that, that didn't matter to me on Saturday night?  Christ Jesus, my Master, spoke a message to my heart for his people, and trusted me enough to steward those words right.  The Creator of the Universe, the Love of my heart, my Lord.


Proverbs 13:12 - Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.


-SUNDAY-
Desire fulfilled: Shoot a really big buck on MY OWN ranch.
       Alright, I recognize that not all of you will understand this one.  You have to know, since I was a little kid, I loved cowboy and ranch things.  When I was in high school, my parents bought our ranch...I was one step closer.

       My whole family has always been bird hunters - dove, quail, pheasant.  That's cool and all, but I wanted to shoot a big deer.  I had shot little cull bucks and does before on other people's ranch to help them maintain the eco-system balance, but I had never seen a buck worth shooting on our ranch.  We were waiting for the right one and the right time.

Sunday, the time - and the buck - both came:

Here's how it happened, if you aren't the hunter (or wife of a hunter) type, feel free to skip past this paragraph.  :)  So, we drove in the "Mom Mobile" (Our diesel Mule) over to this wheat field where we had been seeing Fred the Deer.  (Yes, his name is Fred.)  It was me, Dad, and our Outfitter friend, Chad.  We pulled up and there were 10 does...no Fred.  I was slightly discouraged.  We thought he might've been shot already by our neighbors, because we hadn't seen him in a couple of days.

Dad says, "let's drive over to this one other place that I've seen him."  We drive over to the side of this little draw next to the wheat field.  I was thinking, "It's OK.  We'll come back tomorrow.  Maybe I can shoot another buck.  It's OK.  Jesus will fix it."  (Even if you don't care, you must understand, this was a momentous occasion for me.)

Fred is there across the draw(small canyon for you non-country folks) and back up towards the wheat field .  Fred and a 6-pointer friend actually.  I have Chad's .300 Winchester Short Mag.  This is basically a small cannon.  Fred appears to be 9 points (one of his antler "tines" doesn't for like it should).  Fred is also MASSIVE.  NO kidding.  He easily weighed 300 pounds, thus the need for the cannon.

Fred begins to walk down into the draw.  We lose the line of sight.  We walk quietly, excitedly, nervously toward a fence at the bottom of the draw.  We have him again.  He's turned a little toward us (not a good profile shot) so we wait.  I cannot even begin to explain to you the agony and horrible excitement that you experience at this point.  What if he runs?  What if we don't get the shot?  It's awful.

Chad says, "He's going to walk down the draw...wait for it."  I wait.  (Chad is awesome)  Fred begins to walk down the draw.  Chad again, "I'm going to stop him, you ready?"  I find Fred in my sight.  "Yea, yea," I say.  A whistle...another whistle.  Fred stops, Chad, "now, take the shot."

BOOM!

Fred is clearly hit.  He is stumbling a bit.  He is still moving.  Chad says it was a perfect shot.  (I feel 10 feet tall at that point.)  Fred is attempting to move toward the end of the draw and the big canyon (bad news), Chad tells me to, "put another in him." so we don't lose him in the canyon (all very guyish) I chamber another short mag quickly, line him up, and pull the trigger again.

Big Fred buckles.  It's over.  Turns out, both of my shots were less than two inches apart, right in the kill zone.

It was so perfect.  Then I walk up on him.  He has a front kicker.  He's a 10-point Buck, and I shot him on my ranch with my Dad.

I realize that, that doesn't strike a chord in the heart of all of you, but you must understand, that was a desire of my heart from the time I was a little kid.  God provided the ranch, the deer, the time, and the place.  It was amazing.

Proverbs 13:12 - Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.

-MONDAY-

Desire Fulfilled:  Have friends like my Lone Star Marina Men.

       To say that I was short on friends through middle school and high school would be an understatement.  Describing me as unpopular would've been an understatement at times through those years.  Literally, at times all the way through high school, I was at times totally devoid of having a good guy friend.

       I literally begged God for friends, for men.  I begged God for men who I could share life with, share struggles with, share victories with, enjoy the Lord with, and enjoy everyday life with all the same.  I wanted real friends.  Not just friends that were for a certain part or piece of life, but friends that I could share all of the things that make me, me with.  Jesus, sports, food, good beer, dominoes, prayer, sin struggles, good stories, the lot.

       Monday morning at 5:30 I was praying with some of those friends.  Every Monday morning we meet in a conference call from all over the state of Texas (and one loner from Memphis, TN who needs to get his butt back here.) to pray for each other, for our marriages, for our relationships, to pray that we would endure as men who are called by the name of Jesus Christ.

       When I cried out before the Lord in my bed at 1503 S. Lamar in Amarillo, TX for all those years asking him for those type of friends, I never could've imagined a group like the Lone Star Marina.  Ben, Brad, Don, Geoff, Prothro, Daniel, Sloan, Wes, and Kyle Wood - not to mention all of the sweet women who put up with us and the many other folks who love to hang out with us.

Thank you, Jesus, for my friends.  They are truly a desire fulfilled in my life.

Proverbs 13:12 - Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.




I want you to know why I wrote this blog.  It wasn't to sound like a braggart.  It wasn't to boast.  It's purpose was two fold:

One: To express my heart of thankfulness to my Sweet Love, Jesus for bringing my dreams to fruition.

Two: (And honestly the main reason.) To give YOU a three-fold testimony from my own life that Jesus gives you dreams and He will bring them to fruition.  If you will trust and follow Him, I promise you that He will always bring you a tree of life.


Whether you are waiting for your desired spouse, the desire of the right job, the desire of seeing your kids become successful, no matter what desire resides in your heart - I promise you, you have a God who loves you and longs to fulfill that desire.



John 10:10 - The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows).



Yep,

A Fulfilled, Mr. Hill