the picture above is from a Christmas program last week. this picture turned out perfect! i’ve included some of the rest here for you to see as well. you can also view and download them from the “gallery”. enjoy!

Merry Christmas to all of you wherever you may be this Christmas.

i didn’t get a chance to write last night, but i wanted to mention that yesterday couldn’t have been a more perfect day.  

the day before (christmas “adam” –  because adam comes before eve) i had a good nap after church and so i wasn’t very sleepy that night.  anyways, i slept in on Christmas eve until 8.30 am. (all of our girls were spending the night at their aunt maggie’s house)  then i finally got up and went running/walking.  and i also carried elia’s package home from the post office.  i also got a good start on listening to the Bible through the year – the first 11 chapters of genesis.

then deb and i had a “take your time” morning of getting ready.  and then a quick brunch or so around 10am.  i then worked on cathy’s “fake id” while deb finished wrapping our mountain of gifts.  and then around noon we finally got around to redecorating the girl’s room.  anyways it was just a perfect day because deb and i spent the whole day together.  we were working on the same project but not always necessarily directly together.  but just being in proximity to each other was wonderful.  i loved it!

we then got our kids and took off to yakima around 4.30 pm to be with deb’s parents for the evening.  we met them at their church for a Christmas eve service.  they had a short “kids drama” which was so cute.  the cutest part being when the little girl playing mary (about 5) said her line, “but how can this be because i’m not even married!”  everyone laughed.

after the service we went to my in-law’s for dinner and the girls got to open their one christmas eve present. (every year their grandma gets them new pajamas for christmas eve) and after putting them to bed deb and i went to rhonda’s apt to watch a movie, “the man who knew too little.”

anyways, the perfect day.

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// today i’m thankful for:
1. time off from school
2. the bible on audio
3. perfect days with deb
4. family close by
5. cute christmas plays

i don’t normally write a post here just to link to a post that i’ve written on my “techSTUFF” blog; but i thought that these readers might have some insights, opinions, or arguments against my rants on the subject of “social networking”.

i just don’t get it. myspace, facebook, twitter, etc.

please someone enlighten me!

so usually i consider myself pretty “hip” to new things online or tech wise. but this whole “social networking” thing for some reason is just going right over my head.

but that hasn’t stopped me from trying understand or “get into” it.

i suppose this blog is a form of social networking since it allows for comments and a little interaction. this form i can understand.

it’s the “other” kind that i don’t get: myspace, facebook, twitter, and on and on.

as you can tell from the links above, i have both a myspace and a facebook profile. but i just don’t “get” the point of those sites. now i kinda understand the basic concept of adding friends and then finding out who you’re friends’ friends are. but then you end up with people over 50, 100, or even 300+ “friends”. seriously, does anyone really have over 100 friends? that you keep in contact with frequently. i mean sure you may know those people, or have met them at sometime in your life. but can you really call them your friends??

and all this “commenting/writing on walls” and “messaging” and “posting of bulletins”, what’s that all about?? i mean at least here, on a blog that is, when someone leaves a comment it’s concerning the post that the comment was left on. on myspace or facebook, it seems to be just random hellos and how-are-yous and they’re from various people each saying they’re own things so they aren’t related at all.

and how is “messaging” any different from just writing the person an email?? and the posting of bulletins is the same as sending out a group email. and on my computer i can group contacts together as one label such “family” and then in my email program just type “family” in the “to:” field and it will automatically fill in all of those email addresses. and most of the time on myspace when i get a bulletin it’s mostly the cute stories, chain letters, or junkmail that are normally forwarded to me via email and that i ALWAYS delete, hardly ever reply to (except to say “stop sending me this junk”), or are already sent to the trash via my spam filter.

oh and on facebook, what’s all that “SuperPoke” foolishness about. seems kinda childish to me. if someone really wanted to throw a plate of mashed potatoes at me, then go ahead and do it in person. at least that would be more memorable. or go ahead a send me a “chocolate milk” i like them their delicious. but via facebook, it just seems i don’t know – stupid pointless.

and then there’s Twitter. this one i “get” even less than the other two mentioned above. in fact i don’t understand it so much that i haven’t even signed up for an account. for those of you who haven’t heard of twitter it’s a service in which people write “tweets” or thoughts/ideas/sentences in 140 characters or less. and then other people are supposed to “follow” a persons “twitter”. what can you say in 140 characters?

and people post hundreds of these a day! telling everything from what they are doing “right now” to what they are eating, how a diet is going, how they feel about some show/movie, and anything else. i know that you can upload “tweets” via your cell phone with and SMS. but i haven’t gotten into that much either. perhaps if i got in to “texting” via my cell phone it might make more sense to start “tweet”ing.

well there’s my rant on social networking. what are your thoughts? do you get it? help me understand all of this? maybe i’ll like it if i can understand it better? maybe?

well before any more time goes by, or pointless ramblings fill my head, and i forget what the rest of my thoughts were, i’ll continue my “reflections” from the other day.

i think what struck me the most was the fact that where/when we are right now is not always where/when we’ll be. let me dissect that last sentence a bit.

as much as we (deb and i and kids) love our home, our job, our friends, etc. we most likely won’t be in grandview the rest of our lives. at least i don’t see us growing “old” and dying here. at some point we’ll have to move. yes, as daunting as that seems when i walk though our house and realize that someday it will all have to be lugged into the back of a u-haul and taken to wherever the next season of our lives is.

and even if we do stay in grandview longer than whenever we get out of debt, it’ll be a new season for us. i fee like we entered a new season last january when we transitioned from youth pastors to associate pastors (with small groups and media ministries in my portfolio). i kinda feel like home-wise having twins will be a whole new season for the Lara family. and only God knows what “seasons” he has in store for us next.

about a year ago one of my friends from college had to leave his church because his senior pastor either resigned or moved on to another church. it isn’t the case in all churches but in his church it was written into the constitution and bylaws that when the senior pastor leaves all other pastors must also resign so that the next pastor can bring in his own support staff or rehire the ones there before if he so chooses.

this also got me to thinking about what we would do if our senior pastor ever moved somewhere (for whatever reason). does our church constitution and bylaws have such a “clause”? no, i just checked. but that doesn’t negate the fact that if another person were hired it might be awkward at best and downright terrible at worst if we didn’t see “eye to eye” at first. and then it crossed my mind, would i want to be considered to become the next lead pastor at grandview assembly? would they vote me in if i did?

new season of life. i think out of all of this that it gave me even more of a resolve to 1.) make sure that i stay seeking God’s will for our plans everyday, and 2.) make sure that whenever or wherever our next move will be that it’s a good transition. deb and i went through a transition that was “less” than ideal already, and it’s not something we want to go through again any time soon ever.

so we all have choices to make that will shape our future, and we all must put our trust in God who opens opportunities and closes others. it’s a delicate balance. we aren’t simply controlled by “fate”. we aren’t powerless to change our circumstances or improve our situation in life. nor are we alone the makers of our own destiny. there are people, circumstances, and nature that can turn our worlds upside down in an instant.

so those are my thoughts out loud. anybody have any thoughts or nuggets of wisdom for me? or anybody want to share their own thoughts about “changing seasons” in their lives?

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// today i’m thankful for:
1. that by the time i put my head on my pillow the Christmas program will be over.
2. only two more days of work until Christmas vacation!!
3. times of singing loudly at church late at night in the dark
4. giving gifts
5. my family being warm at night

i’d like to continue my ramblings today for two reasons: 1) after talking to deb about my post last night i thought of more things on the topic to say. 2) for some reason i think that blog posts should have a word count of about 500-600-ish.

now i don’t usually do a word count on my posts because you can kinda tell by the length. and 500-600, to me anyway, seems like the extent of how much people are interested in reading on a casual basis. like i said, for me, if i come to to a blog and see a super long post i have to make a decision about whether i care about this person enough to a) take the time to read this right now, b) make a mental note to read this post later, or c) i don’t care that much this is too much for me to read.

and so i like to keep my posts in the 500-600-ish or less word count. now maybe i’m the only one that feels this way. or maybe your word count threshold is much more or less, but those are just my perceptions.

so like i said i had more to say about yesterday’s ramblings, but i’ve already used up about half of my word count for this post so i’ll have to just write another one entirely in order to say what i wanted to say. and now i’m just rambling about word counts in blog posts in order to increase the word count of this blog post! :-)

oh and i don’t usually count the “today i’m thankful for” in the word count for the post. so the words below don’t count. ;-)

word count: 294

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// today i’m thankful for:
1. deb getting mark and elia’s gift box out in the mail today
2. having fun writing
3. little girls with pig tails
4. pizza hut for dinner
5. being 31 and not looking like it :-)

it’s that time of the year when “best of . . .” and “worst of . . .” lists are coming out for the year. it’s also the time of year when people are reflecting on what their new year’s resolutions should be for the first 2-3 weeks of 2008. i don’t normally do “resolutions” but if i did they might be more like these, than the normal lose weight, exercise more, be nicer to people type.

since today’s my birthday and it’s the end of the year i recently started just evaluating my life and my vision/purpose. it probably has less to do with it being my birthday or end of the year and more to do with the fact that my dad died this year. soon after my father died, my mom started thinking about her own death and began getting worried about the funeral costs. so she encouraged us (her kids) to get a life insurance policy out on her.

as weird (and morbid) as that sounds she was just worried about putting undo stress on us with finances at the very time we would be grieving her passing. and perhaps we could use some of the rest of the policy amount to benefit our families either by getting out of debt or helping with a sizable payment for a house.

anyhow, we haven’t gotten a policy yet but i got to thinking about it this past weekend. i thought about it because my mom went to california to be with her family over Christmas this year. she went via greyhound so i just happened to wonder, what if the bus had an accident in the mountains and she died. (i know, i know . . . unrealistic and unreasonable and totally ridiculous; but i thought it nonetheless.) i got to thinking about had we taken that policy out, our share of the payment would nearly wipe out our school loan debt.

here’s the thing, deb and i have always thought that we would go into some kind of missions work or church plant once we were out of debt. but at least in my mind i’ve kinda gotta plan for that being 5 or so years away. so the thought that it could happen a lot sooner than later really got me thinking about what the future holds.

i started thinking about: where would we go? would we go? or just stay where we are for a while? or would we do something else entirely? or maybe become senior pastors somewhere? or maybe something else entirely? in fact, if i wasn’t doing church work, what would i do? what kind of skills do i have? what kind of job would i be able to get that would support my family??

sort of a “quarter life crisis” of my own. anyways all just thoughts. i’m not meaning to alarm any of my readers (particularly those from our current church). i’m not planning on going anywhere, we haven’t been offered a position or anything, and we’re not dissatisfied with our church or anyone there. (oh and i’m not hoping my mom dies either)

just thinking aloud.

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// today i’m thankful for:
1. birthday brownies :-)
2. great birthday memories
3. extra substitute pay
4. living close to family
5. finally getting my mom’s Christmas gift in the mail

update: added the missing joke punch line.
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so every monday the girls have “eClass” as a part of their online schooling. this is an online meeting with their mentor and the other students that the mentor has. our has mostly elementary age students, but even so it ranges from K-5. there’s about 10 or so students that participate in the eClass.*

as part of their preparation for eClass the girls (anna and danielle) must go to a certain website to read the article of the day and then do some activities associated with the article. there are other games and activities to play on that site once they are done. one of the girls’ favorites is to read the “joke of the day”. these are kid submitted jokes so they’re usually the “one liner” type.

well this past monday danielle asked me to come over and help her type in a joke. here it goes:

“knock knock . . .”

“who’s there?”

“banana”

“banana who?”

“aren’t you forgetting to make
your brother a cake?!”

anyways, she thought this was the funniest joke in the world. and she was giggling to herself the whole time i was typing it.

she then brought it up again a dinner time. well that cause the other two girls (anna and julia) to share their own knock knock jokes. anna’s went something like this:

“knock knock . . .”

“who’s there?”

“banana”

“banana who?”

“aren’t you forgetting to put
chocolate frosting on your cake?!”

and then julia piped up:

“knock knock . . .”

“who’s there?”

“banana”

“banana who?”

[right now i can’t remember what her punch line was, i’ll update this if i find out from deb or julia what it was]
(update: her punch line was “aren’t you for getting to put chocolate frosting on your cake?” and then anna was last and added “are you forgetting to put frosting and SPRINKLES on your cake?”ˆ)

but needless to say for deb and i, we thought it was pretty funny that each joke began with “banana . . . banana who?” that is until the girls just kept repeating their same jokes over and over again.

okay, then. not much to that post. and probably wasn’t very entertaining. but i wrote something simply so that there would be some new content on the blog. in fact i can imagine some of you being really excited to see a new post and then reading this far and thinking “that’s it!, that’s the most profound thing he could think of to share? what a waste of time.”

and that brings a smile to my face. thanks! ;-)

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// today i’m thankful for:
1. apple warranty and service
2. substitute pay
3. the stories of the old testament
4. going to the high school play with deb tonight
5. my mom having the opportunity to visit her family in california this Christmas

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* in eClass the participants must at least have a mic and speakers connected to their computer to be able to hear the conversation. if the participants also have a video camera then the other participants will also be able to see you. our mentor only has a mic, so we can hear but not see her. the mentor also has the ability to show files or websites or a screen capture of her computer in a side window for the other participants to see relevant information.

well the snow has come and gone. and unfortunately for some it melted away too quickly along with some ill timed storms. but in the midst of all of this there is at least some good news. i don’t know how the rest of the churches in the area fared but i’ve visited this one before and am glad to hear it was spared from any flood damage.

the girls had fun in the snow (see the pictures to the right) but now it’s all gone. in fact it’s a very beautiful day in eastern washington. bright and sunny. in fact from the warmth of my home looking outside, it almost looks like a spring day. and earlier this week the high was near 60!! the temperature is back down to “semi-december” temps at a cool 36 for the high today.

for those who don’t know, we get food assistance from the state. and the amount we get in food stance is substantial enough that we’ve grown to rely on it; such that when we budget our income for the month we don’t factor in that much for buying groceries. (make your own judgements about us if you’d like, but this is our current situation nonetheless)

well, we were up for a “review” of our income this past november. we turned in all the needed paperwork on time. but due to the thanksgiving holiday and then a mix up in how they read our church income our benefits got delayed. the funds are normally applied to our card on the first (does anyone else remember the old “paper” food stamps? i remember my dad giving some to me as a teenager to go to the store to get milk or something else). well the first was a saturday so we thought we could get it all straightened out by monday.

we didn’t.

deb called them and they told us they were behind on the paperwork. and finally yesterday. YES, friday 12/7, we got our grocery funds. it was a joyous day.

so what did we eat for a week?? well you know all that stuff you keep in your freezer for so long, that you forgot it was back there? we ate that. and a lot of cereal and top ramen. oh and we used up our budgeted “eating out” money.

here’s the thing “technically” we had real money to go out and buy food. but we had it budgeted elsewhere (a good chunk of it toward our new vehicle fund). we did go to the store and get a few things to get us through the week. but we didn’t want to go out and spend a couple hundred dollars on a “big” grocery shopping trip if possibly the “next day” we were going to get our FS (food stamps) funds. so we didn’t really tell anyone that we were running low on food, because we just thought it would be weird to be asking for food when we “technically” had the funds to buy the food (and that’s not including our emergency fund).

well that’s been our week. we’d wake up every morning, call DSHS and see if any funds had been applied, feel disappointed/discouraged when they hadn’t, and then just realize that we would have to put our trust in God again for our “daily bread” again.

it’s been a good reminder to me that we should be doing that all along. (the putting out trust in God part). anyways, as most crises are, it’s very funny in retrospect.

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// today i’m thankful for/that:
1. we’ve got a full refrigerator
2. God takes care of all our needs
3. friends to play yahtzee with
4. after-school paycheck
5. being a fairly good typer

i’m pretty sure that most of my readers know that i have 4 daughters. so including my wife, the estrogen out numbers the testosterone 5-1 at my house.

i don’t really remember where i first heard/read the joke, but it’s become my standard response when people ask if we’re going to “try again” for a boy or wish that we’d had a boy. my answer, “i guess God figured i was “MAN” enough for the whole family.”

so do i wish we had boy? or is our family still growing because we’re still trying for a boy? i can’t say that i wish one of our girls was a boy. i love each and every one of our girls. and no we aren’t “still trying” for a boy, we’ve wanted to have a big family since we first got married. our “minimum” has always been 5. God has just surprised us with getting 5 & 6 at the same time. but i would say that i would be thrilled to have a little guy(s) in our family.

so what is life like with 5 girls? well as could be expected it always seems that “someone” is feeling emotional (i’m starting to brace myself mentally for when they’re all teenagers and going through puberty. and we’ve only got one bathroom in our current house! start praying for me). our house has toy dolls and doll clothes EVERYWHERE. and we could probably do a laundry load of just pink clothes! there are high pitched squeals and whining. they change their minds about what they want constantly (after-all “it’s a woman’s prerogative”). there’s crafts and papers left in my “space” constantly. and unless i leave the house i can’t ever be . . . alone.

but in addition to all that: there are lots of kisses and smiles. i get lots of hugs. my ladies “take care” of their “man”. i’m treated like a king when i come home. i get a “father-daughter” dance (x4 now) every valentines day. they look SOOOO cute in their matching dresses. i get to claim the biggest pieces of dessert. i get to catch any “vermin” in the house (mice, spiders, bugs). there’s plenty of “cooks” for dad. i love knowing that they look to me for protection. it’s fun to be on the bottom of the pile in a wrestling match. i’m the only one who can use the restroom standing up. they let me live there. :-) and . . . i’m never alone. ;-)

i love all my girls. and i’ll love our next two kids. not “even” if they are two girls, but “especially” if they’re two more girls.

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// today i’m thankful for/that:
1. God takes care of all our needs
2. rubik’s cubes
3. knowing how to solve them
4. i’ve already ordered deb’s Christmas present
5. by God’s grace, somehow we’ll be getting a new vehicle next year