What does the future hold?

Hard to tell, sometimes.

Sometimes, not so much.

I mean, as soon as I'm done writing this, I plan to go downstairs and pop some popcorn.

What do I think the future will hold for my popcorn? Well, I expect that it will lightly buttery and salty, some popcorn bits will get stuck in my teeth, and I will be immensely satisfied after I finish it. I also expect that my wife will ask for some and I will oblige her. I also expect that I will use regular salt and not the orange butter flavored salt because my wife prefers it that way.

But all that may not happen. It may take me too long to write this. I may get downstairs and find some warm chocolate chip cookies waiting for me -- not what I'm in the mood for, but the smell can change my mood quickly. Or a tornado may blast through the house, ripping the gas powered stove from the kitchen never to return. Of course, that being the case, the least of my concerns will be popcorn.

We just don't know what the future will hold. We can make predictions, and they may be mostly accurate, but ask any weatherman why they don't ever give 100% predictions. You just never know.

Anyway, this is an exciting week for me.

Why?

Glad you asked.

There's the Chicago comic book convention that I'll be attending (if you come, look for me at the SALT booth and the Roaring Studios booth). And my comic book from Image Comics and Roaring Studios, "The Hedge Knight", is slated for release on the 6th -- pretty exciting. We're going to make some exciting announcements with Community Comics this week. And then there's the personal drama of day to day life that I won't bother you with. You know, stuff with the kiddies -- my daughter is learning to crawl. My son is using four to five word sentences. See, I'm boring you already.

Finally, there's the Community Comics website, which is growing and growing and looking better than ever. There's a new Cardinal strip and a new Awesomedude strip and the first two pages of a web exclusive Hero TV prequel. And soon, we'll have some new features like the time traveling adventures of the TimeFlies. That excites me.

But you wanna talk about not knowing what the future holds: in the past year we got a new web-master (Marshall Caleb -- a true hero who has put in numerous hours to help out a cause he truly believes in), a new website, got our website hacked, it looked like we'd lose our domain name, got our website back from the hacking, switched to a new server, and found out that we actually WERE in danger of losing our domain name because we were less than a month away from expiration.

Yes, we were hacked. Horrible. We were scared we'd lose our domain name. But if we had not been hacked, we wouldn't have found out until it was too late that we really COULD lose our domain name because the e-mail addresses on the registration were outdated.

God used for good what was intended for evil. All we could see was the inconvenience and the annoyance of the hacking. God used it to save us even more inconvenience.

Yeah, we don't know what the future holds, but as Christians we know who holds the future. Sometimes it's easy to forget that.

I have to go. My wife just walked in and asked if I was making popcorn.

Ben