Have a Yard Sale, Go to Jail!

Behold good intentions running wild in the form of big government! The latest installation in our unfortunately ongoing series has to do with dangerous toys and YOU. Is $200 from a yard sale worth $10,000 in fines? Read here to find out more.

The 2008 Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act is a great lesson on unintended consequences, and a great lesson on why less government is generally better government. Unsurprisingly, its original scope has been expanded from new toys to used toys, which means any resaler (and yes, yard saler) of prohibited items can be prosecuted.

Now, will they show up at your yard sale and haul you away? I seriously doubt it. But are you comfortable with the fact that they have the power to do so?

3 Simple Rules - for Camp, for Life

Living the Christian life is difficult, but it doesn't have to be complex. Jesus had an amazing ability to break down difficult truths into simple stories, to make them understandable by anyone. In Matthew 22:35-40 Jesus breaks down the entirety of Old Testament law into 2 simple rules. And to close the final loophole, he gave us the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 (to clearly define who your neighbor is, and what being a neighbor looks like).

At camp, I enforce discipline - and somewhere, Jerry Roussard and Jim Solomon are laughing at me, I know. I believe discipline is easier to maintain when the rules are simple, clear and consistently applied. And so I break it down to 3 simple rules, 2 from Jesus and one from me, Mr. Baldon:

1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.
2. Love your neighbor as yourself.
3. Give me your best in everything, all the time.

The application of these 3 into a life will result in all the other commandments being followed, as all the others just expand on these basic concepts. For the third rule, my own, I believe the entire Bible speaks to the concept of doing your best multiple times. We are created by God for a purpose, and to fulfill that purpose by definition we must give our best. We are to do all things as if we were doing them for God, because we are representing him in all that we do (3:17). As I discussed in a previous post, the lukewarm will be spit out of God's mouth (Revelation 3:15-16), so we'd better do our very best for as long as we are able.Anyway, I again ask for your prayers while we are at camp. These young people are our Christian leaders of tomorrow, and we have so little time to prepare them. Pray for us, that we would use our time wisely.