The Life and Times of Tony LaMantia

A chronicle of my life...

Thursday, March 23, 2006

The perfect cup of coffee!





This morning I came into the office and got everything ready to make a cup of coffee. I have my own coffee maker in my office because the one in the kitchen makes really nasty coffee. I got the coffee out and used the filtered water. I washed my cup of the dust it collected over the night. I poured the reduced-fat, sugar included, flavored, non-dairy creamer into the cup and then placed the cup under the self frothing nozzel and pressed the button. It was a matter of 20 seconds and I had the perfect cup of coffee. There was that word... Perfect. We had talked about it this morning in devotions with mom and Jamie. So I started meditating on the word perfect. I looked it up in the dictionary hoping to find the "perfect" definition. Guess what, there where 11 definitions. But the one that kind of encompassed them all and made the most sense to me was this: Pure; undiluted; unmixed. Well, my coffee was mixed, and you could even say that it was diluted, BUT, it was mixed with what it was supposed to be mixed with and deluted with purified water. Nothing bad diluted it and certainly nothing that I had not wanted in it was mixed into it. I started to compare that to what we had talked about this morning. We make being perfect harder than it actually is. Perfection simply means not taking the effort that it does take to add the bad stuff. Christ asks us to be holy. We need to first be holy (Black Coffee), then we need to be zealous of good works (Cream and Sugar). Adding the extras that make us more than perfect. That makes us children of God. God is perfect and we are his children, which means that through Him perfection is possible.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Jesus, Is that you?


I was thinking this last week about something. If I was to walk into a room and Christ was present would I recognize Him? Could I pick Him out of a crowd? I know Him! I love Him! I talk to Him all the time. I have never seen Him. So would I know the one that I love having never seen Him in person? I can not say for sure, but I think I would. I hope I would. My goal in my relationship with Christ is to know everything about Him. To know His nature. To know what He loves and to love the same things. I have an incredible relationship with Jamie. I love her, I care for her, and yet I don't get to see her very often. My love for her grows in her absence. Yet through communication I learn her nature. I learn to love what she loves and get excited about making her happy. When I see her, my heart leaps. I don't have to hear or say a word. I think that my heart that me absolute core will know Christ when I see Him. Our connection is not physical. It is spiritual and our spirits have been together. They will know eachother. He will know me and I will know Him. Our spirits which are bound together by Him know eachother just as if I had been with Him in person my whole life. I look forward to that day. I look forward to seeing His face. To being able to commune with Him in person, and at the same exact time I am excited to know his spirit and for Him to know mine!

Thursday, March 09, 2006





Europe