The Walk to Emmaus

Luke 24:13-53 "Ashley's Version"

OK so here is the rundown. Jesus had just been crucified three days before and all the Jewish community in Jerusalem especially the followers of Jesus were all in a state of loss and confusion. So these two guys are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus which was about 7 miles away and they were talking about all that had happened. All of a sudden Jesus began walking with them but God kept them from recognizing him. He asked them what they were talking about and they shared with him about the fate of Jesus and how 3 days before, he had been crucified. They were very discouraged because they thought that he was the messiah who had come to rescue Israel. But that very morning some of their friends said they had seen angels that said he was alive and that the body was missing from His tomb.

This is the part that I think is interesting.....So jesus pretty much tells them that they are ding dongs for doubting that this guy was the messiah and he runs through the scriptures with them showing them all of the prophecy that had been fulfilled in Jesus. So when they got to Emmaus they asked Jesus to stay the night with them. When they settled down to eat their evening meal Jesus took the bread and blessed it and then he broke it and gave it to them......when this happened their eyes were "opened" and they realized who he was and at that moment he disappeared!

OK so I personally think this would be a pretty outrageous experience. Can you imagine eating dinner with some guy you met while you were traveling and then he turns into Jesus and then all of a sudden he vanishes into thin air..........yeah time to lay off the Jerusalem wine. But that's not the end of the story. Directly after all this happened they walked all the way back to Jerusalem to find the disciples. The disciples told them that Jesus was alive and they pretty much said, "Yah we figured that much", and they told their story to them. Now get this... as they were telling their story to the disciples Jesus pops in again and says, "Peace be with You". Everyone freaked out and thought he was a ghost and the funny part is that he asks everyone, "Why are you frightened?" OK you know he knew the answer to that one. It's not everyday that dead people come back to life and all of a sudden have the ability to disappear and reappear whenever they want to.

Ok so in all seriousness now....Jesus asks them why their hearts are filled with doubt and he shows them his wounds from the crucifixion, his hands and feet where the nails had held him to the cross. At this point he does something funny and asks them if they have anything to eat, so they gave him some fish and they all watched him eat it. I personally think this was his way of showing them that he was really not a ghost but that he was really a living being with needs like hunger. So they all watched him eat dumbfounded and he said to them the same thing that he told the two on the road to Emmaus about how he was the fullfillment of the scriptures. and then the bible says,"He Opened their minds to understand the Scriptures". And he says this, "Yes, it was written long ago that the Messiah would suffer and die and rise from the dead on the third day. It was also written that this message would be proclaimed in the authority of his name to all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem: "There is forgiveness of sins for all who repent."

How many of you still don't believe that Jesus is anything more than a good guy who had good things to say and good lessons for people to learn. There were over 300 prophecies in the old testament about the Messiah "Savior" and they were all fullfilled in Jesus. If you would like to learn more about this, you can check out this website http://www.bprc.org/topics/fulfill.html#header_4

Is it all just coincidence? How do you explain it? Does it matter to you? If there was a book that was written hundreds of years ago saying that their was going to be a huge disaster that was going to destroy the whole earth except for all the people who took shelter in a certain building and the book pretty much gave the description of the building, the address, phone number, and website. Wouldn't you take shelter in that building when you saw it built exactly as the book said it would be hundreds of years before. OK so that's pretty much a butchered analogy but you know what I mean.

Jesus is either who he said he was or ......he was a liar, deceiver and pretty much a nutcase. He can't just be a good guy who taught good things. Which do you believe?

In the last part of the story of the two guys that were walking to Emmaus Jesus says, "Their is forgiveness of Sins for all who repent". For some reason after all that he went through he felt that this was the most important thing to say. Why is that? Maybe because it's important.......

1 John 1:9 (The Message) says...

If we claim that we're free of sin, we're only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—make a clean breast of them—he won't let us down; he'll be true to himself. He'll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we've never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God.

Their is forgiveness of sins for all who repent

"Perhaps there is no better definition of repentance than that which is given in our little children’s hymnbook — Charles Spurgeon

"Repentance is to leave,
The sins we loved before,
And show that we in earnest grieve,
By doing so no more."

Jesus is the way the truth and the life, No one comes to the father except through him............I didn't say it, He did!

More Baby Pics

Malachi at 10 weeks.

Sage and Daddy Plant a flower! Burgerville has the greatest kids meal toys. This one came with a little pot, a rake, and a seed packet. I can't remember what kind of flower it is but we will see soon!

von and sage scrub the carpet after daddy dumped chimney ash all over the place. It worked pretty well!
Don't you love those ears!

Remodel continued

Ok so still quite a bit of cosmetic stuff to do, but here is the room without the wall. Pretty cool huh, opens up the room alot!

Beginning the Remodel

Ok here is another phase. There was a chimney there a few minutes ago. Von is tearing out the whole chimney from top to bottom and that includes the wall that goes with it....you'll see. I can't figure out how to move pictues so this whole post will be in reverse order. Scroll down to the bottom to start at the beginning.

Ok so the tomasini's have got this crazy idea to remodel, or actually demo and start from scratch. This is a picture of our back shed that is shaped like and L around our back room which is this really weird all pupose thingy with our fridge and office in it. Our idea at this point is to tear it all off and add a 25X25 2 story thing. We'll keep you updated on what it actually ends up being. Ok so here is whats going on so far. By the way my husband is amazing! He's like Bob Villa on Steroids.



Ok So now you can see the L shaped shed is gone, revealing our weird little laundry room. Thanks to our friends from texas it was all done and cleaned up in one day!

A More Serious Affair...

Pro-Life or Pro-Choice?

Are you willing to have your opinion changed?

About a year ago my Father came up for a visit. As we were walking on campus he asked me something that has stuck with me ever since. "What are the students passionate about here?" He said, "When I was in college there were demonstrations and students would picket, for various reasons." I thought about it and realized that our campus is a pretty sleepy one for the Northwest. In the last two years since I have been here I have only seen one Demonstration that involved "picketers" carrying signs and chanting anything, and it wasn't actually the students it was the professors who wanted a pay raise and were threatening to strike.

Well all that changed a few weeks ago and there was another demonstration carried out by mostly students carrying signs and chanting their mantra of choice of which at the moment I can't remember, and it was all because of something "we" did.

A month or so before Malachi was born, Von was approached by a man named Darius Hardwick who works for a Non-Profit Non-Religious Pro-Life organization called the Center for Bioethical reform. He wanted to know if our Student organization would host the "Genocide Awareness Project on Campus at the end of May. The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) is a traveling photo-mural exhibit which compares the contemporary genocide of abortion to historically recognized forms of genocide. It visits university campuses around the country to show as many students as possible what abortion actually does to unborn children and get them to think about abortion in a broader historical context.

My first response was ummmmm no...I am definately pro-life but I don't want to offend people or ruin our organizations position on campus. So Darius asked if he could come and give us a small group presentation about what the GAP project was all about. Let me tell you this was one of the hardest things I have ever seen. The first thing he said was, "I'm not here to judge anyone who has had an abortion, I'm only here to give people the facts about abortion." He then proceeded to play a video that showed the development of a baby and it showed exactly when they developed a heart beat and brain waves etc. Much earlier than most people know. This video also had some extremely graphic pictures of aborted babies that made me want to be sick. This may sound weird but I felt that I owed it to all the "People" those little babies would have become if it weren't for being aborted to watch it. It was aweful, but afterwards I knew that the only thing to do was to put my vote in for bringing the GAP project to campus. We took a vote from our students and it was almost unanimous that we should support this. Not only did our students support bringing it but they also stood by and handed out literature and talked to their peers and professors as they walked by the exhibit. It was a definate symbol of their commitment because they faced many harsh words in the two days that they were there. It was amazing to see how many people reacted harshly to having to look at the gruesome photos, but still thought that abortion was ok and it should be a womans choice to take the life of an unborn child. But it gives you an idea of what most people thought of the exhibit. I am excited to say that the next day we heard from one of the nurses on campus that a young woman had come in saying that she had planned on having an abortion but changed her mind after seeing the exhibit. We had a post abortion support table set up and crisis pregnancy hotline numbers posted all around the exhibit so that people had an opportunity to seek help if they needed to . There is so much to say about the experience but my fingers are tired so if you have any questions or would like to know more facts about abortion in the U.S. or world wide please ask, I've found out more than I ever thought I wanted to know.

ok so the photos and article that follow are from the local paper. It wasn't totally negative so I guess that is a good thing. My own thoughts are interjected in red print.

Campus rally raises hackles
Story by: Craig Coleman
Date Published to Web: 6/6/2007
MONMOUTH -- Taken from the Polk County Itemizer Observer

Dominique DeWeese had been driving down Monmouth Avenue when the exhibit in front of the Humanities and Human Sciences Building caught his eye. So piqued was the Western Oregon University's senior's curiosity that he parked his car and headed back to get a better look. Hanging from a 10-foot-high display were dozens of posters showing aborted fetuses, juxtaposed with images of death and carnage from bleak scenes in history, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and mass killings in Rwanda. A caption beneath graphic Holocaust and race lynching scenes read "Final Solution, Separate but Equal, Pro-Choice." "Lynching and abortion ... there's not a correlation there," "Both seem to be the discarding of unwated human beings" said DeWeese, who is African-American. "They're trying to make it the same thing. "I don't think these should be here," he continued. "There are other ways to get your message across." Shock and revulsion is what coordinators of the "Genocide Awareness Project" hoped for when they brought the controversial mural exhibit to campus on May 29-30. Sponsored by the Center for Bioethical Reform, a national anti-abortion organization, the initiative seeks to expand the context in which people view abortion by placing it alongside traditionally recognized forms of genocide, said Darius Hardwick, a regional coordinator for the group. "We're upsetting the status quo," Hardwick said. "On a college campus, the default opinion on abortion is pro-choice. "We're not making a subjective that abortion is wrong for some people," he continued. "We're equating it with killing - and killing is wrong." For several hours on both days, project volunteers handed out flyers and engaged pedestrians in conversations about abortion, even as the photos drew dirty looks and a few harsh words. "How is your fascism rally going?" yelled one driver from a passing car. In a letter posted on the college's web site a few days before the event, Western President John Minahan notified students that the display would be on campus and that it complied with university and City of Monmouth scheduling requirements. Minahan wrote that the presence of the project "represents an opportunity to test our commitment to respect the (free speech) rights of others and the challenge to use that respect to temper our individual response to potentially controversial material." Tiffani McCoy, a member of Western's student government, said she and some like-minded classmates decided to hold an informal demonstration against the project after first seeing the display the day before. About a dozen protestors stood a few feet away from the mural, brandishing signs criticizing the genocide comparison and pro-choice slogans. "First amendment rights are important," she said. "But I think what they have up there is misleading." Student Meagan Lamb said she felt the display was a form of harassment. "When I'm at school I shouldn't be bombarded by images meant to change my opinion on how I feel about things,""OK so I thought that was what higher education was all about" she said. "Abortion is a choice." The event went mostly without incident, although campus security did respond after some protestors tried to obscure the display by marching in front of it with a large white banner. Protesters complained about CBR volunteers videotaping them during the incident. Hardwick said his group videotapes as a security measure, as murals have been defaced and destroyed by bystanders in the past. Some Western students and even campus employees volunteered on behalf of the exhibit. David Perry, president of the Western's chapter of Northwest Collegiate Ministries, said he has always been against abortion, but never to the degree of actively demonstrating against it until learning of the awareness project. "Seeing the pictures of aborted babies," he said, "is a burden on the heart." Karissa Coleman, who works as a sign language interpreter on campus, used her lunch break to pass out flyers for CBR. "People have come up and talked to us and if they are pro-life or pro-choice, they're leaving the same way," she said. "But they have been open to the display and to talking with us." DeWeese described himself as "in the middle" when it comes to the issue of abortion. He said the exhibit alienates those who are undecided. "This turns me off, definitely," he said. "You see this on TV, and what do you do? You turn it off." "Why is it that abortion is so ugly that we don't want to look at it, why is it acceptable and why is it a woman's choice"?

(Ashley) - So the most compeling picture I saw through this whole thing was a photo of two 24 week old fetus's. One was an aborted fetus and one was 24 week premie that was in intensive care. The only difference was that one was wanted and one wasn't.........why is this a choice that is allowed. Which of these babies didn't deserve life? Which one wasn't really a human. If they where both human beings why isn't this considered murder?

More cute pics!

Sorry for the red eye, everytime I tried to fix it the kids eyes turned grey and looked even freakier than the red believe it or not.

New Family Pics