I just finished the filing my Federal and State taxes, as well as paying my first installment of our property taxes. In Sunday School, we just finished studying about how the slaves in Egypt paid 20% of their produce as a tax to Pharaoh through Joseph. The slaves had a good deal. We pay a total of about 27% in taxes -- and I'm sure I missed some. I am not complaining... much. We live in a great country. It's just that people sometimes forget that if the government does something, we have to pay for it.

• 10% Effective Federal Income Tax (after deductions and such)
  
• 3% State Income Tax
• 9% State & County Sales Tax (don't forget utility, gasoline, and phone taxes)
• 5% Property Tax  (property tax compared to our annual income)
  

  

Romans 5:3 (RSV) says, "We rejoice in our sufferings..." and I Thess 5:16 (NAS) commands "Rejoice always". There is no one I know who has lived these verses out more powerfully than my younger cousin, Melinda. In 2007, she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Since then, she has had 2 surgeries, with a 3rd surgery coming up on Monday, Feb. 1. 

However, ifyou read Melinda's most recent journal post (Jan 27, 10), you will not find someone who is petrified, but someone who is bubbling over with thankfulness, literally in every paragraph. Melinda spends more time praising her surgeon and asking people to pray for God to bless him, than she does asking for prayer for her own surgery. Wow - what an example for us all.  The next time I start to complain about something, I need to shut my mouth, re-read this post, be thankful, and pray for Melinda (and yes, Melinda, I will pray for Dr. Madden too).

An eight-year-old daughter of a friend of mine asked him, "dad, in like a million, thousand years are they going to write a sequel to the Bible?" Here is my long-winded response to her...

"God's sequels, unlike many movie sequels, are always more powerful, exciting, etc than the original (ex. 1st Earth/New Earth; 1st Adam/2nd Adam).  If God authors a 2nd version of His Word, the same will be true of it.

But wait, maybe in a way, He has already started. 2Cor 3:2-3 says that our transformed lives are letters of Christ, are trophies of God's grace (Ephes. 2:7)

Revelation 20:12 talks about books that contain all the deeds people have done. Unbelievers are judged by these books. Perhaps these books also contain our story. Maybe we will study them, discovering how God worked through ALL the events in our life, good and terrible, to protect us, bring us to Himself, and showcase His grace. And then, after we have just begun to understand God's goodness, we will hear other people's stories about how God did the same thing in their lives.

Maybe, just maybe, WE are one of the books in God's sequel."

Karis an I just returned from a beautiful, albeit overcast trip to Starved Rock with some friends from church. We viewed the first Bald Eagles that I have ever seen in the wild.  The frozen waterfalls were mind-boggling -- good thing I didn't bring crampons and 2 ice-axes. The path and wooden steps were icier than I have ever seen them. Thankfully, I was wearing a pair of Yak-Traxs that I picked up at Menards for $14. It was like walking on dry pavement the whole time, even when I climbed around the ice-fall.

Despite getting my first bike with a motor, regularly bicycling is still alive and well. I rode 2,507 miles in 2009. For the first time in my life, over 50% of those miles - 1,306 of them - were ridden inside.

Grand total for the last 26 years? 38,698 miles. Click on the image on the left for all the breakdown. Only 200,000 miles left to cover the distance from the earth to the moon.

I like to publicly comment on how our retirement funds have done at the close of each year, in hopes of offering some encouragement to others. In 2006, I started taking personal responsibility for managing our retirement money by investing in 10-15 individual stocks, with the help of Motley Fool Stock Advisor. My goal was simple when I started. I wanted to do better than the S&P 500. 2008 was an awful year.  However, as a result of not withdrawing from the market, we ended 2009 slightly above where we started in 2008. The current score, from 1/2004 to 12/2009:  S&P 500 - up 1/4 of 1%;  Our investments - up 102%.

Below is a table of how our retirement investments have done over the last 6 years on an annual basis.

Year	Method	Our Increase	S&P 500
2004	Mutual Funds	16%	09%
2005	Mutual Funds	08%	03%
2006	Indivd. Stocks	24%	10%
2007	Indivd. Stocks	52%	04%
2008	Indivd. Stocks	-40%	-38%
2009	Indivd. Stocks	72%	23%