Our Daily Bread is a devotional that I follow.  Some days it seems totally irrelevant to my life, other days spot on.  Today is one of the latter.  Today’s verse has to do with how God used Gideon for his purposes and how he provided Gideon with the necessary resources.  It caused me to reflect upon the people who God brought into my life while in prison and how he used them and now how he is using me in other peoples lives.  This comes at a time when I was feeling a bit down and really having some difficulty seeing any purpose to my existence.  This comes to me today as I am having a conversation with a former customer, someone who had a website here more than a decade ago, and who is going through some difficult mental issues primarily with anxiety.  Now I know that all the years I suffered with anxiety do have some purpose because otherwise I could not identify with what this person is going through.

    I seem to have prevailed in my battle with the state of Washington to regain my voting rights:

     It’s like, “Welcome back to society.  You’re still our bitch.”

     This is the last shot I got off before my camera battery went dead, before the fireworks display started. My camera battery failed to charge properly because it got too hot in the house and the thermal cut-off in the charger that prevents exploding the lithium ion battery shut down the charging prematurely.

     Yesterday, went to Kirkland to watch fireworks over Lake Washington.  Unfortunately, my camera battery didn’t charge properly because it was too hot and the charger batter decided it was fully charged when it was almost empty so I didn’t get any pictures of the fireworks.  But I did get this photo walking down the hill the lake as well as a few before sunset shots.

     Today is that day where we celebrate victory in a bloody battle for independence from the British so that we could become just like them.

     Today, Our Daily Bread focuses on James 3:2-10.  I can particularly related to this as I have a habit of speaking without considering the consequences, but it also relates to a subject that has gotten under my skin a bit lately, and that is the gay takeover of the rainbow as their symbol when those of us who know the Bible know it was intended to serve as a covenant between God and the Earth, which was a promise to never again flood the whole land.

     A lot of people take that to mean, the next time God decides to wipe man out would be by fire instead of water, but I don’t believe that God would give his sons life, even for three days, to save us from our sins, if that were the case.  To be sure, I do believe a final battle between good and evil is coming, and I do believe there will be a lot of carnage, but the Bible is clear on which side will win and so we only need to choose the winning side.

     So the challenge I felt was, how do I remind people of the original meaning of the Rainbow without attacking the gay community, and I chose to do so by simply doing that, reminding people of the original meaning and that we all, gays, straights, and everyone in between need the gift of life that Jesus provides for us.