bierkergaard

Luke 17:21 "Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." I watched a good deal of both the Republican and Democratic Conventions. Citizenship requires an informed and educated populace and I feel as if I should do my part to hear out the respective platforms and speakers. I sense Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are both men who care about their country and are serving for the right reasons, whether I agree with their positions or not. Yet, I do think we are breaking the political system by putting far too much hope in it. We expend a great deal of resources pulling causes one way or another and I have to wonder if all of this political rope pulling, like a Tug-Of-War, leads to exhaustion and stalemates. Or worse yet, a frayed society and even the snapped rope of cynicism. The genius of America was voluntary civic associations and charities, not government as god. Government has a char...

1 Sam 13:20 So whenever the Israelites needed to sharpen their plowshares, picks, axes, sickles, they had to take them to a Philistine blacksmith. I was having a conversation with my brother Matt yesterday about gardening. His neighbor spent a good deal of the afternoon working in the prosperous garden in his yard to the left while my brother and I were on the porch drinking beer and shooting the breeze. To the right, was my brother's garden; a gnarled mess of tomatoe plants. Too many plants, too close, creates a ghetto garden. Some separation, fewer plants, actually empowers growth. I have learned that lesson. Quantity is great, but first focus on quality and be careful of compromise. So, I was sharing this lesson with my brother as well as reflecting on how in America we have a lot of land that is basically uncapitalized and unproductive, unless one counts green grass as somehow valuable for anything more than impressing neighbors...

Yesterday, I went for a hard and hot run in Valley Forge Park. The circle path was five miles and change. However, I went left when I should have gone right, adding at least another three miles and thirty minutes to the run, into the rising sun heat maw of the morning. No getting in and out, I was going to sauna sweat for a prolonged period. 8 miles. I can gauge the exertion of the run to some degree by the sweat index on my shorts. Starting at the top, the further the sweat travels down the shorts like a crick over the banks, the harder I know the run has been. There are other variables of course. Like how hot it is, whether there is a breeze, if I have some shade. But all things being more or less equal, yesterday's run was extreme. My shorts were soaked. No island of dry anywhere. Again, as I have written before, I don't pull crap like this just so I have stuff to write about. Error, particularly with directions, comes naturallly and it is only retrospectively where a...