The funniest part of my day so far has been this:

WHERE IS BEN?

HE’S NOT AT HIS USUAL SPOT AT THE COMPUTER…
NOT IN THE BATHROOM, NOT ON THE PORCH…

BUT WAIT!!!! THERE HE IS

Who But Ben would be thrilled to chill out in the sun, with a good book, on top of a septic tank?

A little blog on healing because it’s been on my mind lately. Ben led a study a while back on God’s will and on prayer, and since then it seems like it’s been an ongoing topic of conversation and thought. The Bible says in James 5 that “the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well”. But also that “when he asks, he must believe and not doubt…”

After examining my own heart and faith I find that I actually struggle with doubt and believing in miracles and healing. Sucky realization, but good in the humility department and just for awareness. Thankfully, it is the faith of others in the church community who can do the praying in faith which leads to healing.

I was able to experience this first hand a couple of weeks ago. At our little Sunday night fellowship/House church thingy we were discussing this topic and how it might seem like God doesn’t do big things like this because his people don’t ask in faith and expectation. Now, I had been experiencing a few weeks of, lets just call it, stomach discomfort, and that evening was having pretty stinko cramps and pain. So, I felt the nudge to mention this and share my struggle with faith in healing. It ended up that friends felt like they wanted to pray over me for healing, and in their words, eyes, hearts and everything they absolutely knew God could do it, and would do it. The rest is history, I guess. I haven’t had any pain since.

For me it has been amazing in many ways, for healing, and for my faith and learning about and experiencing God’s promises and faithfulness, and the importance of close fellowship.

The last 2 weeks we’ve gotten to spend lots of time with each of our families. First, my brother, sister-in-law, and new little nephew were over from San Fran, my sister and brother-in-law down from Maine, and the whole crew together for some good times. We had a rockin’ talent show played, ate, and enjoyed each others company emensely. It was sad to see it end, wish every weekend could be like that. See lots of Merrill family pictures here

Then we took off to PA to visit Ben’s family and get ready for Kerris’ wedding! Grandparents, Aunts, and Uncles were there from all over and it was nice to catch up with everyone. Lots of pictures here

First I must apologize for not updating my faithful readers more often. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here! I’ll have to throw everything in at once in one huge super-blog post.

Summer is going great here at the Holt household. I just finished reading Jill “The Last of the Mohicans”. We pick blackberries from our backyard almost every day. We take hikes and bike rides. Jill is on reduced hours in the summer (around 10 per week) while making the same salary as during the year. I work about this much during the summer as well, so we have a LOT of time together. Other couples might go bonkers spending this much time together, but I love this arrangement. We are keeping “busy” in other ways as well…

We started a house church recently! Just a few friends from the area have agreed to embark upon this venture with us. I have been thinking about small churches for around two years; it was time to try it out. There are pros and cons, but so far it has been going great. We meet for a potluck dinner that we call “communion”, which is just a communal meal we share while remembering God in our conversation. Then we are presented with a short lesson or discussion or study from a different person each week. We have also done a few songs. Tonight is our third week, and we’re expecting around ten people!

One of the GREAT things about a small church is that each person has so much to offer and contribute - and we can cater to everyone! Many of us like to pray silently instead of out loud, and we can pray as a small group any way that we want! We can adopt ideas and be more flexible than a bigger church in how we “run” things.

Also, I recently got a web design job for a client in Texas. It’s quite an involved site, and I’m hoping I can deliver a professional-looking product. It’s a database-driven site that will sell real estate like hotels and restaurants. This week I’ll be brushing up my PHP and SQL skills for this big project.

I’ve been playing music with Hannah Daman and Jill. Tonight we played at an open mic in Framingham at a coffee shop. We were invited by my friend Jeff who likes to play out a lot. Jill has great rhythm skills and Hannah sings very nicely. Together we played some acoustic type covers and original songs. The audience seemed to love us and we got a lot of comments. The manager also asked us to come back next month and play a longer set!

On the geek end of things, I’ve been tweaking my backup scripts. I bought another hard drive to use as a Time Machine backup. However, I also run rsync via SSH to the very server where this website resides. These are Linux servers that happen to have rsync and SSH available to clients, which is great! Rsync is great for incremental backups rather than uploading everything each time an update is made. The only problem is that the Linux servers mess up my executables - all my applications are not usable if I download them from the server. Therefore I’ve been using disk images or tarballs to package up my applications before syncing. It’s tedious but at least it works.

Finally, tonight I learned how to use ipfw to “shape” my bandwidth. My SSH backup was eating up all my bandwidth uploading at top speed. Fortunately in OSX you can control your bandwidth for any individual protocol. I set port 22 (SSH) to 100 kb/s max, and it’s chugging away in the background leaving bandwidth for my more important stuff!

Next week is my sister’s wedding! I have to start practicing as I’m playing in it.

My band (Overshine) has also been practicing hard and recording. We recently recorded a couple of songs (which took all weekend) with this amazing engineer. He’s a solid guy who recorded most of Stryper’s albums and tours with them and other bands as a sound tech. He did our project in his home studio, and it was a good time. We’ll probably be playing at clubs and bars in the near future!

I think that will do for now so as not to bore you, dear readers. Thanks for indulging in my long update!

This past month I’ve had fun experimenting with some new designs while crocheting with plastic. Here’s what I’ve come up with!

Little heart bag made from plastic table cloth and boston globe bags!

This is a double stranded bag, my strongest yet, can carry all my library books in it without strain! i think most of my future bags will be double stranded like this…

This is my newest, cutsie pie bag! I just love it. It is made from lotsa colored boston globe bags and the handles are plastic crocheted around tupperware lids! The Stonyfield Farm yogurt and Quaker Oats containers never knew they had a second life waiting!