Value of the Human Soul

Gary is holding a fake 1 million Euro bill. Now just imagine if it was real. What would you give for a million Euros? Would you give this nice Ross Castle pictured behind Gary for it? Would you give one of you eyes, ears, arms or legs? Our physical body is worth great value, more than a million Euros. What about your soul, how much is your soul worth? Jesus said "It is foolish to gain the whole world but loose your soul". Our souls are priceless. God puts more value on our souls that any thing else including Euros. Ireland had been hard and ministry is Ireland is very slow moving.

But, the other day a man came over to our house to tell Gary that he has "got his life straightened out with God". He wanted to tell Gary that if for nothing else God brought us here to reach him.

We have questioned if our time in Ireland has been worth all the time, energy, hastles, emotions and money and we think from a human point of view this is quite natural to do. But from God's perspective if one life is impacted it has been a valuable time because God puts great value on each and every soul coming to follow him and changing their life for ever.

Just think how much God loves you and how much each one of us has value in His eyes. It is kind of hard to get your head around the idea that we are worth so much, so go now and treat each other with such value.

( A little Gary benidiction at the end there, did you notice?)

HAPPY ST PADDY'S DAY

This is about as Irish as we could look for the day! We spent part of it cheering on the Irish rugby team in the six nations tournament over at the Ballincollig Rugby Club. They beat Italy so joy was to be had. We would have liked to go to the parade down town but they were expecting 60 thousand people to show up and there is just no parking. It would have been difficult to get Kirbey around as well but she sure enjoyed yelling and cheering on the rugby players.

Please no more pizza, pasta, scrambled eggs or Chinese! My dad, Tom Ryan and I had a great trip to Rome, Italy. We hit all the tourist sights you could see, from the Coliseum to the Pantheon. The idea to go to Rome started when dad was complaining that he had too much money and he would just have to leave it to his kids to spend after he died. I said instead of me spending it then, why don't we spend some of it together while he was alive. I knew he was coming to visit us in Ireland so I suggested we go to Italy, on dad, while he was here and he said great idea and, the rest is now history. Or I should say we saw history. Here I am with my first latte and here is dad on our way to the coliseum. We ate a lot of pizza because it was everywhere and it was cheap, we ate Chinese 3 times because it was near the hotel and it was good and we had pasta because it is Italian. The hotel advertises that it has a hot American breakfast included but all that meant was scrambled eggs, EVERYDAY. I don't think I want scrambled eggs for a while, 7 days in a row is plenty. As well as Rome we also went to Naples and Pompeii, Naples not so nice but Pompeii was very interesting. Here are pictures of pottery and a plaster cast of a body frozen in time when the volcanic ash hit. Now we are investigating the history in Ireland. A few castles, churches and forts etc.