I was reading through my Commonplace Book in Day One this evening and ran across this quote from a Desiring God article titled, Should Non-Christians Lead Worship? Although there’s much more to the article than this single snippet, there’s plenty to ponder right here:

Worship is a believing heart’s response to the work of the Holy Spirit, not an emotional response to the quality of the music.

This has gotten me thinking primarily about how I worship God, and also about a need to grow more in sensitivity to God’s Spirit and an openness to His work in my heart and life.

This year I’ve been doing more gardening than in previous years, and I think I’ve gone a bit overboard. In fact, I’ve been writing myself various notes about “holding back on planting too much” that I hope I’ll conveniently find sometime around February next year. And I’m still not certain that gardening has helped me destress and relax as much as I’ve thought it would. But that’s for another time.

The weather is heating up quite a bit, so we filled up the kiddie pool in the backyard today. After lunch, everyone hurried outside to play in the water, but the fun soon turned to tears and screaming when water was poured on an unsuspecting victim. I happened to be watching from the back door, and encouraged the offended sibling to “fight back”. This comment led to a full-on water fight, complete with laughing, screaming, and plenty of running around the yard.

Played a game of Rat Hot this evening with my wife. This out-of-print game takes a unique spin on the concept of tile-placement, where each player is attempting to pair up their color of “spices”, while trying to cover up any of their rats that might be showing. Expose too many rats, and you lose!

I captured a photo of some tulips in our backyard after taking a walk this afternoon. These are probably the last tulips of the season, which makes it feel like spring is almost over. Of course, we still have a week or so to wait until it’s safe to really start planting vegetables and stuff in the garden, just in case we get the usual Colorado “surprise” snowstorm.

The other evening, I really enjoyed reading through the “Coffee vs. Tea” article in the latest issue of Standart magazine. At the conclusion of the article, the author (Mike Riley) essentially states that coffee is the winner, providing the following evidence: