This last weekend was a great one in many respects. The best part of it was that my Godson Enrique, or “Enriquito”, stretched out his arms to me for the first time. Enriquito is my first nephew, and I was getting worried because he got scared any time I tried to pick him up. But not last weekend. I didn’t have to do much for him to smile. A couple of times he even offered me his arms when he was with his dad or mom.

The experience of the weekend culminated in a deep reflection that God blessed me with at mass on Sunday.

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U2 has had a “Zoo” theme for a long time in their music. I think it began with their ZooTV tour for their Achtung Baby album, and then the Zooropa album followed.

Well, during the concert in Houston Friday night, the Edge started playing the intro to their new song “Miracle Drug”, and Bono, before singing the song, started talking about how The Edge flew in from space in the 1970′s and landed on the north side of Dublin, Ireland.

They asked The Edge where he was from and he said: “Zootopia. It’s a place in the future.”
Bono: “What’s the future like?”
The Edge: “It’s better. It’s better.”

And The Edge was playing these four notes as he spoke, the first four notes to “Miracle Drug”.

The G, Robert, and I mostly laughed as he was talking, as we knew he was just spouting a bunch of silly stuff for the sake of fun. That’s Bono for ya!

U2 Vertigo Tour Houston, TX Toyota Center. My first time to go to a U2 concert and it was worth every penny. U2 is known as one of the best live bands around, and they didn’t disappoint. The band was fully into every song they performed and really got the crowd engaged.

You can read the full review below, but my favorite part of the concert was when U2 finished the first encore with the classic With or Without You. Roxy, my girlfriend, isn’t the biggest U2 fan, but she knows they’re my favorite band. She thinks all their songs sound the same, but I’ve inserted a few U2 songs into some of the CDs that I burn for her on special occasions. Anyway, the only song she recognizes is With or Without You, so I called her when U2 started playing the song, told her I loved her, then held the phone out so she could listen to the entire song. She loved it, and I think I have converted her into a U2 fan. We decided that we will go to a U2 concert together some day.

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Gerardo has an older brother named Enrique, who is married to Veronica, and they have a little son named Enrique, as well as a new baby on the way!

Enrique and Veronica met while at Texas A&M, and I met them there while in school, since the G and I were good friends. Their house really is a home, and it felt great to be in the home of a Catholic family who loves Christ so much.

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After the U2 concert on Friday night, Nathan, Robert, me, and the G drove an hour west to College Station, Texas, home of the fightin’ Texas Aggies to watch the football game against Iowa St.

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Friday night the G, Robert, and I all went to the U2 concert in Houston! Some Jamaican band opened up for them, which we missed most of. Whoever they were, they had one guy up on the stage dedicated to just waving the Jamaican flag around and jumping up and down.

It took about thirty minutes for the crew to setup the stage for U2, and we had a very enthusiastic U2 fan a few seats away from us who was standing the entire time they were setting stuff up, shouting in an Italian-New York-type accent: “Let’s DO it!”.

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Okay, that title has nothing to do with this post and is just a spoof on the funny line I read on Jimmy Akin’s blog, “NO, it is I who will eat you!”.

Tomorrow, the G and the R and myself are meeting in Houston for the U2 concert. How do you dismantle an atomic bomb, asks Bono, and the answer is love (more U2 theology which is a little bit oversimplified, but that’s alright).

Then we are all going to the Aggie football game to watch the Aggies DIS-MANTLE the Iowa St. whatever-they-are’s. We might not even have to have the traditional midnight yell practice to prepare for these guys.

THEN, the G and I are going to go to his brother’s home to hang out with him and his wonderful wife, Veronica and their two babies (one still in su vientre, so we won’t get to play with her much yet!). (Vientre == womb).

Have a blessed weekend, and know you are in my prayers (seriously, I actually pray for you as God needs to do some supernatural work to make this blog edifying for you!).

Last week I made a real low-level fix to my code in order to optimize it for a product we sell at our company that is trying to ship “real soon”.

Well, this fix wasn’t going to get much testing, so I knew that if it introduced new problems, and if I didn’t find those through my own testing, things could be bad (as in, tens of thousands of customers’ software crashes and we get support calls costing even more money).

So, I GROANED late yesterday afternoon when I was doing my last bit of testing (everything so far had looked good), and suddenly something pretty simple quit working! In my mind, I thought “Oh crud, if this is a new problem I just introduced, and I can’t figure it out by tomorrow, then I might have to work this weekend and miss the U2 concert and the Aggie game and visiting my best friend growing up who I haven’t seen in months.”

The problem was a tough one, so this morning I went to Mass and asked St. Joseph to obtain for me the grace to figure out the problem. I also offered a decade of the Rosary for the intention so our Blessed Mother could help, too.

Then I went in to work and began debugging the problem. Another developer from the product involved with this bug came to help me, and as we looked at the bug, it appeared that my worst suspicions were realized: the problem occurred in part of the code that my changes affected, yet everything mysteriously looked fine in our trace statements.

I kept thinking, went back to another test machine, and then God put together a few thoughts in my head, along with a memory of something that a developer did 3 or 4 YEARS ago that could be connected. I had a theory, so I tested it out, and BOOM! that was the problem. It was a bug that had been there for 4 years and only now was found, AND it wasn’t in my new code, so I was off the hook.

And then I went to adoration and thanked God and St. Joseph profusely!

(Really, Bono, if you are reading this, you gotta play “40″ as a song of thanks to God for his grace and love (and plus the G loves that song)).

I borrowed the G’s “Self-Titled’ Caedmon’s Call CD again this week. I need to just go out and buy it as I have borrowed it for weeks on end many times!

The CD has great music with great lyrics, and I recommend it to any Christian. The last song is called “Coming Home“, and some of the lyrics struck me today in particular that I wanted to mention.

Will you run to me?
Will you come to me?
Will you meet me, will you greet me
Will you drag me home ’cause I’m still a long way off

Yes! These lyrics do evoke the parable of the prodigal son, but I love the last line of this verse, where he asks God to “drag him home” because he’s so still far off.

I have literally told God many times, when I feel that my heart is not where it should be for some reason, to “use whatever means necessary” to bring me closer to his heart and to conform my own desires to his. Even if he has to drag me, I want him to make my heart like unto his!

I know he won’t take away my free will, which seems to me like a gift and a curse at the same time. I know God doesn’t want automatons, but I sure can’t wait until Heaven when sin and evil are gone and, in the words of Bono, “then there will be no time for sorrow–then there will be no time for shame” (Where the Streets Have No Name (live from Rotterdam)).

(Only two days ’til the G, the R, and me go to Houston for the U2 concert, so I got them on the brain!)

…are nothing compared with the glory to be revealed in us (Romans 8:18).

To be glorified with Christ, we must also suffer with him (cf. Romans 8:16,17). There is no way around it nor out of it. Atheist or Christian, you will suffer in this life–the only question is how you will handle it.

Will you offer it to Christ to unite with his sufferings, believing in what God revealed through St. Paul’s testimony and pray to learn obedience through it as Jesus did, or will you run from it, get angry at God for it, and turn away from him because of it?

Every single thing that happens in our lives–much outside of our control–our loving Father wills to happen that we might be saved. He literally can use every single event to bring us closer to him, if we just listen to him and accept his help in each situation. May I start to follow this truth in my own life!