ink’d… ‘love dad’
Posted by jaked | Filed under art?, billings, holidays, just4fun
so i managed to steal someone’s computer long enough to throw together a quick post because well, it’s been forever since i have done anything here. so here goes…
i work a part time job right now while i’m raising support in order to pay of those oh so lovely student loans. not my top 10 things i wanna to be doing with my time but hey i gotta pay back my debt to the state of montana.
anyway, one cool thing that the job’s given me is the opportunity to rub shoulders with some folks who i’d normally not get to and have gotten into some cool conversations as well as heard some crazy life stories. my latest is with one of my only male coworkers (trust me not as cool as it may sound) and this guy has had a rough life. he grew up in cali and did his part to raise the local crime rate. i mean california has a reputation to uphold right?
all of that aside he had a pretty rough time at home as well. His dad disappeared when he was 7 and the last he heard from him for a long time was the birthday card he sent for his 8th birthday. as sad as it is this seems like a reoccurring theme i hear in alot of people’s stories. it’s almost uncommon to hear about a family that has stayed whole for the long haul…
this guy pretty much grew up without really knowing his dad and after a while he just gave up hope ever reuniting with him. well he’s grown now and has a two year old daughter of his own. after this new adventure came into his life and he started to understand the importance of the father’s role he wanted to try and find his dad to try and rebuild their destroyed relationship.
with the amazing jumps in technology and the internet he said it didn’t take a whole lot to track the man down. i’ll skip some of the gory first meeting details to the next part. they started working things out and his dad was grateful to have the opportunity to be a part of his grand-daughter’s life and father and son became a family again.
this whole story came out when this guy i work with came into work with a bandage on his forearm. i asked him what had happened and he said he got a tattoo.
he peeled back the bandage to reveal, in what looked like handwritten script, the words ‘love dad.’ i asked him what the significance of it. he told the aforementioned story, as well as its conclusion… last year at about this time his father passed away from lung cancer. he said he had really only known his dad for about 8 and a half years of his life.
the tattoo was how his dad signed the birthday card he received on his 8th birthday. it was actually even made to look just like his father’s hand-writting. he got the tattoo on the one year anniversary of his father passing away. so at this point i was about to break into tears…
we had the opportunity to keep talking and i go to share about my relationship with my dad as well as how that too has been redeemed and everything that went along with that and how it was part of a bigger life change. a much bigger life change.
now depending on your own personal view of tattoos you may fall on one of two sides of the fence: the people who like tattoos or the people who are scared of people with tattoos. i kid i kid. tattoos are interesting to me because they mean so many different things to so many different people.
now you could be like this guy…
and just go to town. i mean i don’t know this guy… i just googled ‘stupid tattoos’ (i would recommend putting google’s safe search on strict first) and he was one of the first to pop up. and who know maybe all of those have some sort of deep meaning to him… right…
lots of people have tattoos to profess love, faith, loss, pain, sorrow, happiness, accomplishment, and almost anything else. i mean i don’t have any… as of right now but i know i’ve experienced all of those things and i never want to forget any of them because they’ve all been a part of the master plan for my life and have shaped me into who i am today. cheesy right?
like this whole support raising thing, i think i’ve probably felt all of those things throughout this whole process, and when i get through the initial part of it maybe i’ll get some ink to always remind me of the provision that has gone before me.
how about you? do you have a tattoo? do you look similar to the guy above? what event (events?) that have happened in your life might warrant commemorating with some ink? feel free to share in the comments.
if the end isn’t near i don’t want to see what else is coming…
Posted by jaked | Filed under billings, i don't need no stinking label
so while i’m down in rainy florida at new staff training apparently it’s the end of the world back home in billings. apparently an incredible tornado touched down and destroyed a good chunk of the billings metra. amazingly enough the action was caught on film by someone i met last summer when i helped out with journey church and harvest church’s jr/sr high summer camp. below is a link to the video of the metra being torn apart as well as a picture of the inside and a video of the aftermath.
cue the dramatic music?
Posted by jaked | Filed under billings, mpd, new chapter, support update
It’s been a really long time since i’ve really wrote anything here of real meaning. i’ve gotten to post some pictures and what not but as far as substance… not so much. so here’s my feeble efforts of being (somewhat) serious in what’s been going on.
well i’m about half-way through the time i have to raise support for my year at montana state. as it stands right now i’m at 15%. not exactly where i’m supposed to be at this point but hey if God can part seas, keep the sun from setting, and providing food through birds this is seriously nothing. despite that it’s been really tough to preserver with a real lack of momentum. and it’s not just support stuff that’s been rough. in the last two weeks i’ve had the privilege to destroy both my cell phone and ipod as well as came close to losing my car. in the saying that the Lord givith and taketh away, he’s really been in the taketh away mood lately. so that’s really been my prayer lately, that God would start to give this process some serious momentum.
recently, (last night) thanks to a man who’s been a phenomenal encouragement to me gave me a link to a talk by dr. david jeremiah entitled “when you are in a hurry and God isn’t.” one of the things that really stood out to me is when he talked about patience being the same thing as endurance.
“no matter what kind of shape you are in if you push yourself to the limit you will come to the place where you hit ‘the wall.’ that means you come to the place where your mind and your body begin to argue with one another. your mind says ‘i can’t do this anymore!’ and your body starts to agree. but because you are determined you just keep putting one foot infront of the other until you come to the point where you break through the wall. and you get a new burst of energy and you get what they call the ‘second wind’ and with the second wind you get a new burst of energy even greater then you had at the beginning…”
i feel like this is the part of the story where the plot is supposed to really take a turn. where things start going right for our hero… where the second wind really kicks in. because Lord knows i’ve hit the wall. i’ve hit the wall, backed up and ran into it even harder only to be knocked on my butt again. so here i am back in billings hoping and praying for God to show up in this last month and a half. i’ve got 85% to go and not alot of phone numbers to call. so please be in prayer. thanks and hopefully i’ll be able to do this a little more often and so they won’t be so long. and in everything let God’s will be done.
listening to:
emery – …in shallow seas we sail
