Up @ 4:15 a.m. consistently.
Other consistencies… exercise, Pray, reading Psalm’s, having breakfast. To practice being faithful I used making coffee in the morning as the yardstick. Funny how when you purposefully commit to doing something how when you miss doing it it is quite glaring, so I marked it as unfaithful.
The month started out on a good note, “start diet, No Soda” and ended with a good note, “faithful made coffee, God’s restraining hand, I am not patient without Him”.
Some highlights,
the 1st “start diet, no soda”,
the 4th my son Logan woke me up, “Dad, Mohammed Ali died!”
the 12th gave a stranger a ride to church,
the 15th was an epiphany day, I was driving truck for work, picking up a pontoon boat in southern Wisconsin and I literally “crossed The Rubicon”, a small river in the Rubicon township in Wisconsin. This is definitely a separate post!
the 23rd drove my oldest son and his fiance to the airport at 4:30 a.m., they were headed to Jamaica for a friends wedding.
the 27th notes indicate, “studying engraving, Jesus is the pattern on our soul”, unfaithful no coffee,
the 28th “God is carving us out”, faithful made coffee,
I also started to use a heartbeat pattern as my “banner”
When I use it free hand I make it look more like a “z” tilted or laying down. I joked with myself, “When ever I own my own ranch, I’ll call it “The La – Z – y Z Ranch”, I used the old mark of Zorro as the start, turned it left and added straight lines, looks cool on the end of my name too. I am thinking about developing it into my theme, business card, logo etc etc. Here are a few rough drafts. The Emerging Man, indeed!
The engraving process came up and really struck me this month and I did a study on it.
I started with Isaiah 49:16 “See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;…”
The nails they used to crucify Jesus resemble the awls people would use to create engravings.
Looking up engraving @ woodengraving.com there are 10 basic tools for hand engraving.
- a small block of box wood (best) – end cut
- leather sand bag for working on
- lozenge engraver -for varying width lines
- v – shape – for hatching
- spitsticker – for very fine lines
- round scraper – for curved textures
- flat scorper – for clearing large areas
- tint tool – cuts thin parallel lines
- multiple tool – cuts several parallel lines at once
- The art or design – to be transferred to the block (which you would get from a professional artist, unless you are the artist and engraver, which is quite a combo of skills)
When the printing press was invented engravers had a new medium to display their work and the publishers liked it because the best papers would have the best art to help the stories.
I believe trying to set new habits require new “lines” to be etched deep inside our brains and hearts.
God uses his gold overlay of His Son on our very souls and starts a work using the blood of Calvary as His ink. His Word is the awl that He uses to carve out those new lines that conform us to the image of His Son.
I couldn’t find a picture of a workman and how I think God looks while he is working on us. It must be very pain staking and tedious. But how faithful He is.
Here is a picture of me, of how intently God must be, while working on us.
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