The Ballad of Tyler's Day Off (or "There and There Again")

Here is what I have done today, my day off:

5:48 am - Awaken to Adrien getting up to feed the dog & cats. The dog usually needs to go out to do his business around this time, and the cats start walking around on our heads, saving us the convenience of setting an alarm to make it happen. We basically take turns getting up to feed them, and apparently today was Adrien's turn. I try to sleep a bit more, returning to my dream where I was shopping for unexciting items at a warehouse-type retail store.

6:58 am - Adrien's internal alarm now wakes her up, she starts getting ready to leave. She is leaving on a week long trip to collect terrapins in South Carolina, (tag them & release them back into the wild), so we are up and going a bit early.

7:06 am - having spent my 45 seconds needed to get ready to walk out the door, I start watching Mythbusters as Adrien continues gathering things & eats her breakfast.

7:32 am - leave for Davidson College, where Adrien works, to drop her off for her trip.

8:03 am - Adrien & I help one of the students from the school (who is also going on the trip) move her belongings from outside of her dorm (which she is technically out of for the year) into the Herpetology Lab for the week (as she cannot get into the summer housing yet).

8:34 am - Kisses & hugs, Adrien is on her way to play with turtles for a week, and I head back to Mooresville.


8:49 am - Stop off at Food Lion to get milk & coffee creamer. Sale on Pepsi - five 12 packs for $11. Jackpot. I go with three Diet Pepsi Limes, a Pepsi Throwback & Mountain Dew Throwback. I also spend an awful lot of time ambling through the aisles in the store. In order to necessitate an easy transport of 5 cases of pop, I have gotten one of those weird little carts, with two baskets on top of one another. I feel silly pushing it around, but it does the job. I decide that I want some breakfast sandwiches, and begin looking for items to make this dream a reality.


9:12 am - Stop at the church to fill out a form that I have to have in before tomorrow. Warm greetings from Nellie, the church secretary, who reminds me it's my day off. Nellie is great.


9:24 am - Stop at the house, take in the groceries, but need to run and drop off our house keys to a friend who is going to feed the animals over the weekend while I'm on a beach trip with the Middle Schoolers.


9:34 am - Dropped off the keys and back at the house. Fix break fast sandwiches, essentially egg McMuffins. The sausage patties that I got come in two packs of four, meaning, if I cook one, I have to cook four. They are also much smaller than I the picture on the box led me to believe they would be. Too small to really cover the ground they need to on the muffin, but too big to really put two patties in one sandwich. I somehow manage to pull it together and just muscle through this dilemma. I make three sammiches, eat them, and immediately think I should have only had two. While I'm cooking, I am listening to the audiobook biography of Walt Disney. They are up to the late 1940's, and are talking about the rival studios in MGM & Warner Bros. I reflect on how much the Warner Bros. animators used the f-word, which is markedly more than I would have guessed.


10:02 am - Sit down on the couch, sleepy from early rise and three heart attack sammiches, and put on the news shows from last night. Schroeder, our mute cat, hops up on my lap, essentially willing me to lay down so that he can sleep on me. His mind control works, and I am trapped under his purring, cotton ball frame. Within minutes, he is in deep sleep, stretched out to his extreme length. I think of how I wish I had put a DVD in before he sat on me, and lament my inability to move out from under this 15 pound animal. For some reason, his mind control is still working on me, as I am unable to make myself disturb his slumber so that I can get up. The phone rings. I can't get to it, for fear that I would disturb sleeping beauty. Everything gets blurry...


12:21 pm - I wake up in a haze. Clearly I have been drugged. The cat has somehow given me me a substance to steal two hours from me. What these two hours will play in his larger master plan, I have yet to deduce, but I'm on to him. In a disoriented funk, I lightly push him off of me and sit up, getting my bearings. I hate naps. They ruin me for the rest of the day. Perhaps Schroeder knew this, and had it in his plan to steal far more than 2 hours of my life. Giving into this notion, I decide to watch Saludos Amigos, a Disney film about South America from 1943. It's not that great, and Adrien really doesn't like it. Having just recently learned some insider info about it from the aforementioned biography I'm reading, I see this as a good time to revisit it.


1:15 pm - The movie is over. Short, at only 43 minutes, I'm not sure that many people would actually call it a movie, it's better than I remembered it, but that's similar to praising the fact that the dog poop you just stepped came off your shoe a lot more easily than you expected.
I enjoy a Pepsi Throwback, being one of only a handful of non-diet pops that I have had in the last few years. It is made with natural sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup (as nearly all pop is nowadays), and even with my dearth in non-diet pops over the last few years, I can instantly sense how good this is. Huzzah.


1:21 pm - On to the internet to check email. Nothing of significance, I am suddenly struck with the idea to look Amy Grant up on Wikipedia. Amy Grant, the Christian musician from the 1980's & 90's. I have no idea why this compulsion came upon me. Perhaps it is an after effect from the drugs the cat gave me. I learn all that there is to know about Amy Grant, moving on to Michael W. Smith & Sandi Patti, completing the 80's CCM trifecta. From there, I fall down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia, leapfrogging from Mormonism to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. Thanks a lot, Amy Grant. Look what you have started...


4:49 pm - A phone call from Adrien breaks me of the Wikipedia spell that Schroeder & Amy Grant had cast on me. I go outside and chat with A for a bit, then sit in my back yard for a bit. i watch McFly, our dog, doing dog stuff. I watch the trees doing tree stuff. I get genuinely excited realizing that the yard is ripe for a mowing. I resolve today is a good day to sit outside and read a book.


5:20 pm - I go inside and return with a youth ministry resource book, and after sitting down, tell myself that reading a youth ministry resource book is not what I meant when I decided that I wanted to read a book outside. I sit there for a while longer, watching dog stuff and tree stuff and figure I should probably mow now if I'm going to. I then see that the mean dogs in the backyard adjacent to ours are out. These dogs are fine until you get within 5 feet of the fence, then they become jerks. Mowing is no fun when they are outside, at least the mowing withing 5 feet of the fence. I resolve to wait a bit to mow.


5:38 pm - I reflect on how I haven't blogged in a while, and I am simultaneously astonished and incredulous at how little I have accomplished today. I decide to try and record everything that I have done today in blog form, to see if it looks any better, like less of a waste of a day than I think it has been.


It doesn't.


You win this round, Schroeder.


But I'm on to you...





[FYI - a "Vampire Weekend" channel on Pandora yields glorious dividends. I highly recommend it.]

We're Gonna Have a Party

So now I've got this stuck in my head.

(You only need to watch about the first two minutes).

Things in the Mail.

I get lots of junk in the mail at the church advertising for all sorts of Youth Camps and retreat centers and stuff like that.

I got one today that was advertising their space for retreats.

It had this picture on the front cover:
I don't know where this place is, but I don't ever want to go there.

a thought, briefly

The audience on American Idol is like a Unitarian Church - they love every performance, and only get mad whenever anyone says that someone did something wrong.

I hope the Navy Seals don't go to Pittsburgh...

To put some historical perspective on recent events, I offer this graph to you all.



(Stolen from my friend Val, who in turn stole it from someone else. Try piracy indeed.)

Pretzel Day Thursday

Everyday, my route home from work brings me past both the local high school and middle school. Often times, when I have driven past the middle school, there is a sign out front that says simply, "Pretzel Day Thursday." There is nothing else on the sign.

I first assumed that it was some sort of seasonal fundraiser, and that the following Thursday would be a day when the school would be selling pretzels. However, Thursday passed just like any other day, and the sign disappeared.

Then a few weeks later, the sign was back. Since then, it appears and disappears seemingly at random. Sometimes it is present on Mondays or Tuesdays, sometimes it's there on Fridays. I have yet to find out what Pretzel Day is, and I'm not sure if I want to know.

Today, the Pretzel Day sign was outside of the high school.

In my ten months living in North Carolina, I have rather routinely been presented with large cultural caverns that my southeastern Iowa/southwestern PA upbringing had not prepared me for. Example: "Cotillion" or kids taking classes in being fancy, dancing, and dancing fancy.

Perhaps Pretzel Day is some mystical southern delight that I am not yet privy to.

Or perhaps it's code for predictions of the end of the world.

Or perhaps it's simply a day when they offer pretzels for lunch.

At this point, there is only thing that can be certain about Pretzel Day - it's Thursday.

The Gospel According to V

Adrien & I just returned from a week in Los Angeles. We were visiting our friend Kyle, who goes to Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, but lives in Hollywood.

Throughout the week, we encountered several "celebrities," a partial list of which follows:

• The Hotel Manager from Ghostbusters ("$5000?!? I had no idea it would be that much! I won't pay it!" - he was sitting on a bench drinking a smoothie.
  
• Neil Flynn, The Janitor from Scrubs. We saw him in an improv show, and he then proceeded to hang out in the bar/lobby area for an hour afterward.
• Tony Hale, Buster from Arrested Development. He was at the church that we went to, where Kyle works (Ecclesia - churchinhollywood.com)
• Tim Meadows, from Saturday Night Live
• Jane Kaczmarek, the mom from Malcolm in the Middle
• Larry David & Jeff Garlin, from Curb Your Enthusiasm. They were filming an episode at Zuma Beach, which we watched for about an hour.

Yet the most interesting person on the trip I met one afternoon that we spent on skid row in downtown LA.

Adrien's friend Sarah (who is the co-founder of Faceless International) was leading a trip of students on a mission trip to inner city LA, and we asked if we could join her for the afternoon.

When we showed up, they were working with an organization called The Dream Center to serve lunch to the homeless. There were already several helpers in the food line, so we joined a group to walk around the block and invite people to come to get some food. As we began walking, Kyle sat down on the sidewalk by a man next to a shopping cart filled with bags of cans. The man's name was James. Kyle started talking to him, asking him how he was doing, and James immediately put up the wall, challenging Kyle a bit, and playfully indicating that he's had lots of people come by and try to evangelize to him, that Kyle was nothing new. Adrien & I continued around the block with the rest of the group as Kyle remained back with James, chatting away, not talking about anything in particular, but taking James' playful jabs in stride.

After about 10 minutes, we had looped the block, and I went up to see how Kyle was doing, assuming he may need "saving" from the undoubtedly uncomfortable conversation that he was having with James. When I got up to them, though, they were having a real conversation. Not about God or Jesus - Kyle wasn't selling anything. They were talking about James' life, how he would like to get help from The Dream Center, but he doesn't want to leave his cart, certain that someone would steal his stuff. He talked about how he got $60 a day collecting cans and cooking grease, and how he has a problem with drinking. I sat down on the sidewalk with the Kyle and James, and a third man, who simply introduced himself as "V."

V was, like James, another ragged looking man, well worn, with a scruffy white beard and weathered old hands. He also had a shopping cart filled with bags, and he was drinking a slushy that James had bought him because "he had lost a bet."

V and I started talking about life. Nothing specific, just stuff. We talked about where V was from, and how he got out to Los Angeles. We talked about how Los Angeles was the most accommodating place to live on the streets because it doesn't get that cold, and the city is fairly amicable to it's homeless (unlike cities like Baltimore that was way too cold, or Atlanta that ships the homeless out of town with one-way bus tickets).

V had grown up in West Virginia, but made his way out to LA on freight trains. We never talked about how he had come to live on the street. Instead we talked about football - about how dumb Terrell Owens was, how great the Steelers were, and whether or not they would be able to pull off another championship season next year. We then talked about how terrible the Pittsburgh Pirates are.

At one point, V asked me what I did for a living, and I told him that I was a minister, working with youth. I was afraid that this would change the conversation, that he would sense some sort of ulterior motive in me, but he didn't. And I honestly didn't have one. I was simply sitting on the sidewalk talking with an interesting person.

After a while, a woman walked up to us who lived in the area, looking for her "vodka partner," and visibly a little drunk already. She must have seen Kyle and I talking to these two men, and assumed that we were on an evangelistic mission, trying to save souls to log in our soul saving tally books.

Neither of us at this point were talking about God in any way, we were simply talking, but the perception of two white guys sitting on the sidewalk talking to two men with carts probably usually means proselytizing is afoot.

She plopped down between us, visibly antagonistic, and stammered, "What the f__ are you doing here?"

"Talking," I said.

"But what the f__ for?"

"Just to talk."

She was very confused, especially as I didn't seem to be looking to challenge her. She then started challenging me, trying to pick apart the Bible, the Trinity, and Paul. I responded simply by essentially just nodding and saying, "that's interesting," refuting bits that were a bit too aggressive in their attacks, but not taking the bait for an all out fight. It was clear that the woman didn't want to have any sort of real conversation about faith, but simply wanted to take me apart and catch me on my heels. I didn't give her the opportunity, and she calmed down, said she "loved the Bible" (?), and then went to find her vodka partner again.

There were two interesting things about this encounter. One was that I felt exactly what I imagine most people on the street feel when zealots come at them trying to slam them with the Gospel. I felt attacked and uncomfortable. The last thing I wanted to do was to listen to what this lady had to say. She was not willing to talk, only to preach, and that's rarely the type of encounter people want to be broadsided with.

The other interesting thing was that V stood up for me. By this point, we had been talking for nearly an hour, and V immediately tried to get the woman to leave us alone, saying, "This is a man of God, what are you talking to him like that for??" V and I had clearly bonded to the point that he wasn't going to let me take crap from this lady.

Again, up to that point, outside of letting V know that I was a minister, we hadn't talked about God at all. It hadn't come up, and that wasn't really my goal. We were just two guys talking.

At another point, a film crew came by, filming images of people on the street (though skipping over the four men having conversation) probably for some B-roll on the news about homelessness or for some documentary. It felt surprisingly intrusive, and the crew themselves stepped around us as though we were simply part of the scenery for their dystopian landscape. It was oddly dehumanizing, even for Kyle and I, clearly tourists in this scene. They easily walked past each individual, just as I had easily walked past James and V on the first trip around the block, thinking of them as simply "homeless people" rather than people that I could sit down and talk to for a few hours.

It was V who finally brought up God.

The woman had said that Paul was "clearly gay" (though she used some stronger language) while she was trying to get a rise out of me. A few minutes after she left, V asked me about homosexuality, about what I think that God thinks about the issue. Frankly, that was the last thing I was expecting him to ask me about, but I answered him, ultimately saying that there is nothing that can separate us from God's love, that there is nothing that anyone can do to void our salvation - other than to actively refuse it.

V asked me about the first sermon that I had ever preached.
It was in high school, and it was about The Empire Strikes Back, how we can't really follow Christ if we don't actually believe that he can use us to do incredible things.

The whole point came out of the scene where Luke is trying to raise his X-Wing Fighter from the Degobah swamp. He can't lift it, and yells at Yoda for asking him to do the impossible. Yoda then lifts the ship out with a raise of his hand and sets it on solid ground. Luke says, "I don't believe it!" to which Yoda replies, "that is why you fail." We then talked about how Peter had that such faith in Christ that he did ridiculous things, like walking on water. Eventually, we talked about suffering, about God's presence in the world, and the love that he has for each of us.

Our conversation lasted over two hours, and it was just that - a conversation. It wasn't a sermon, or a chance to "save some souls!" It was two guys, sitting down, talking about sports, life, and faith. I didn't give V a Bible or some sort of religious track (I didn't have any to give even if I had wanted to), but we had one of the best conversations about faith that I have had in a long while.

V could sense that God loved him, that God was at work in the world, but it seemed as if he wasn't sure if he had faith in himself enough to trust in that with his life. James was much the same way. Both men were tied to their possessions. They seemed to be the primary excuse that each of them had for not seeking help, to get them off the streets. LA has a great system of programs to help the homeless, but leaving their possessions involved the risk, the very real likelihood that it would involve losing everything that they owned.

Most all the programs offered beds and meals and help getting employment, but also required that participants remain sober and celibate in the process. The risk was that, if they lose everything that they had worked to salvage, all of which could fit into a grocery cart, and they didn't have the personal strength to remain accountable to the program, then they would be back on the streets, but this time without anything.

It was quite a revelation to see how much the human need for things, that we are tied to our stuff, was so apparent even in these two men who seem to have nothing. We most often point to the upper class - with all their extravagance - as the prime examples of materialism, of worshiping what they own. Yet here it was, on the streets of LA, two men who hadn't enough faith to risk what they had for the promise of something better.

It made me think of how much I am like V. All too often, I'm holding on to my possessions, my cart filled with garbage, letting it distract me from the promise set before me. I think most of us struggle with this. We want to be comfortable, but we don't want to risk losing our stuff, regardless of what that stuff is. We may believe the promise, that our life can be so much better if we are willing to let go of what is holding us back, but we still don't have the faith in ourselves to stay true to it if we were to actually follow it.

Sometimes we can convince ourselves that we are fine where we are, being motivated by what we have to lose rather than what we have to gain. We blind ourselves from seeing that we are capable of helping ourselves and of helping others because we are afraid of what we might loose.

In the end, when the time came for us to leave, I said thank you to V for a great conversation and asked if I could pray with him (the first really proactive thing that I did all afternoon), and he said yes.

I prayed for courage and discernment, and for an awareness of God's presence in our lives, even in the midst of overwhelming suffering and lack of faith. I prayed for myself as much as for V, and he prayed right along with me. I offered him the rest of my coffee (he had turned down some coffee earlier, but accepted this time), and we went on our way.

My conversation with V was one of the best that I can remember. It was a conversation with no agenda, but ended up exactly where it was meant to.

I don't know what will happen with V.

Hopefully he will one day find the courage to take that step of faith that gets him help.

All in all, though, V is no different than any of us. We're scared to take the first step, scared of what we might lose.

God has made us a promise not to harm us, but to prosper us, never to leave us, but to walk with us. Sometimes, though, our own doubts in ourselves, and the comfort of our carts full of stuff make it hard for us to take that step.

God + Bad Things = Huh?

Musings from the west coast (I'm with Adrien visiting our friend Kyle in Hollywood):

I have been thinking a lot recently about two specific questions that we have been looking at in our youth group. They are two questions all of us will continue to ask at various points throughout the rest of their lives:

"Why does God let bad stuff happen?"
&
"Do the things we do actually matter?"

These are two of the central questions of faith, and dramatically effect the way in which we understand God, and our relationship with him.

The prime mover in both of those questions is that God is in control.

We may not always understand it, but when we look back, we can see God moving even in the midst of tragedy. God's will is always what happens. God's desire is for there to be no suffering and for the world to be perfect (what will ultimately be achieved).

The discrepancy between the two is free will combined with our broken human nature. God's love for us gives us "free will," and sin uses that freedom in ways that cause suffering. While God doesn't desire us to suffer, it is still within God's will (what he allows to happen).

Essentially, you can't have broken humans executing their own free will and not have it lead to suffering. Likewise, you cannot really have love without some sense of free will.

It's similar to parents teaching kids to ride a bike: their desire is that the child learn to ride the bike and to not get hurt. Their will, however, is what they allow to happen, and we understand that in order to ride a bike, everyone has to fall. While that is not the parents' desire, it is still their will, in order to achieve the end result. Yes, the parent could simply push the child around all the time, ensuring that they are never hurt, but that wouldn't involve any action from the child, and ultimately, the child would never grow from that.

God is in control.
All the time.
Even when it seems like he's the most out of control.
Look at the Passion.
The greatest suffering and chaos of all time, especially to those who experienced it. Followers of Jesus watch him die like a criminal, and they have no idea that he is coming back. They are scared, lost, and disillusioned. They fear for their lives. Their whole understanding of the world has failed them. Or so they thought.
As we can see it now, the Passion was one of the times that God is most active in all of history.
God was in complete control, doing exactly what needed to be done to save us.
Yet to the disciples and followers of Jesus, they felt about as alone as ever.

God was in control then.

God is in control now.

Glasses.

(The Poindexters, 1997-2009)

Glasses are weird. I have had them since I was in seventh grade, and ever since then, it's odd for me to think that there are people who wake up in the morning and see everything perfectly. I feel like glasses (or contacts) are something that everyone should need, that eyes aren't designed to be perfect. Clearly that's not true, but nearly all of my closest friends and relatives wear corrective lenses in some way.

Glasses are also weird in how much they represent who you are, and how much we immediately discern about someone's personality and character based on the frames that they have.

I recently had to retire my trusted pair of glasses that I have had for the last 12 years. I was quite a fan of these glasses. They saw me through the good times and the bad, and helped me to see a lot of things differently. I had an older thinner pair of wire-rims that I also wore intermittently as well, but it was the black rims, which I shall refer to as "the Poindexter" that truly felt like my glasses. Once, when I was having the lenses replaced on them, the glasses technician who actually said, "Don't ever get rid of those glasses!" I'm not sure they are that special, but I really liked them.

A few years back, two things happened: the wire-rims snapped in half, and Adrien hit me in the side of the head with a ball during a youth group game, cracking the arm of the Poindexter glasses. It was then that I knew that I would soon need to find some new glasses.

I was able to get the wire-rims hastily "repaired" to give them another year or so of life, but the clock had started. The Poindexters were still alright as well, definitely wearable, but the crack was enough that it was clear I would soon have to retire them or watch them die.

I have spent the past year or so looking for something as close to the Poindexters as I could find, but to no avail. During that time, the wire-rims cracked again (vaya con Dios, wire-rims), and each time I put on the Poindexters, I was afraid that it would be the last.

Then, in January, I stumbled on a site that seemed like a scam (in fact, I'm still rather surprised that it isn't). From this site, I purchased three pairs of glasses, for $35.

Not three frames for $35. Three pairs of glasses (perscription lenses & frames) for $35.
Not three pairs of glasses for $35 each. Three pairs for $35 TOTAL (shipping included).

I chose the opportunity to therefore try some new looks, and came up with some winners:

The Invisaline Glasses.
These are invisible feather weight frames that are so light to the touch that you can barely feel them. They do however require you to wear contact lenses and are not actually real.
Cost: $free

The "Almost Poindexters"
This was the closest that I could find. They are a bit rounder than I was looking for, but the price was right.
Cost: $8


The Coffee Shop
What better way to say "I might be pretentious and kind of a jerk" than with glasses like these. When wearing these, I begin to think that Smart Cars are just that, and that perhaps I haven't seen enough movies by Ingmar Bergman, and that I need to read more of the writings of David Eggers.
Cost $8

The Dungeon Masters
These frames have a million hit points and maximum charisma. With these babies I can program in C++ and see nuances in the movie Tron that I never quite grasped before. Clearly frames designed for those who have nothing to prove to anyone.
Cost: $10

I'm not sure that these three frames fill the hole in my heart left by the Poindexters, but the cheapness makes me feel like a genius.

I also would like to note that I have no regrets about dropping the extra $2 for The Dungeon Masters. They are great to wear when you want to tell people, "I have all the friends that I need, thank you very much," but don't want to sound like a jerk about it. They also provide you with added authority when called upon to settle matters of random trivia disputes (especially in the realm of comic books, sci-fi, and sci-fa).

Cat Horror.

I got this from my friend Lori's blog, but it is perhaps one of the more hilarious and terrifying things that I have seen online in a while, resulting in literal laughs out loud.

Check it.

The Crowd

Today, I led a Bible study on Mark 15:1-15. The passage tells of Jesus going before Pilate, having been condemned by the chief priests in a secret meeting the night before, and now put before Pilate as an enemy of the state, a treasonous threat to Caesar's authority.

The passage deals with Pilate's reluctance to convict Jesus, and with his attempts to allow Jesus to go free. He appeals to the crowd, having the usual custom of releasing a prisoner in honor of the Passover feast, encouraging them to let him release Jesus to them. The crowd resists, instead asking for Barabbas, the murderer who had just been involved in an insurrection against Rome.

This whole scene made me think of a number of things (the amazement that Pilate has toward Jesus' demeanor, the envy that the chief priest show toward Jesus), but the one that stuck out the most was the crowd's flip flop. Just a few days earlier, they were praising Jesus, and honoring his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, placing their outer garments on the road his donkey was walking on, so that even the donkey would not be made dirty. Yet only a few days later, they are calling for his death.

We often shake our heads at the crowd there, lamenting their fickle hearts, seeing them as mindless ogres of history, that killed Christ. In reality, though, I don't think they are all that different than us.

Jesus was a hot religious figure. He blazed onto the scene and attracted big number quickly. People wanted to be part of this movement. They were attracted to the bigness of it, if not the truth of it. However, when Jesus is presented before them by Pilate, this is not the same conquering hero that they had welcomed into Jerusalem a few days earlier. This man was instead a man who was dirty and ragged. He had been up all night being cursed and beaten. He was bound like a criminal, and was now on a public trial before them all, again, not as a hero, but as a criminal. In this context, it becomes a bit easier to see the crowd's anger. They feel like they have been fooled by this guy. He came in and preached all of these glorious things, but here he was not presented as a criminal.

Think of how much we revel in the times that our celebrities fall. When you see a mugshot of someone, we see them as broken liars who deserve punishment, not as the heroes that we had once hailed them as. Even more so when that figure is a religious leader. We as a culture seem to love to see religious leaders fall. Many times, even the accusation of wrong doing is enough for us to condemn them.

Why is that?

I wish it was harder to relate to this crowd than it actually is. I wish that crowds weren't so easy to follow, even when we know that they are wrong...

Happy Saint Patrick's Day
(fanks to Val for pointing out this pic)

Fat.

Two things have happened that have reminded me that I need to lose weight:

I was finishing a bag of chips, and neared the end of the bag, and made the choice to then dump the remaining crumbs into my mouth. No matter how many chips you have just eaten, whether it is the whole bag or just two or three, there is perhaps no more slovenly way that you can finish it than literally pouring food into your face. As I have said before, I always feel a need to reconsider where I am in my life whenever I find myself dumping chip bits into my food hole.

Right after that, my cat jumped up on my lap and started happily kneading on my belly, as if to emphasize my doughy physique.

Thanks, cat. I get it. I need to lose some of the weight.

T Rex Domske

Each week, our youth group gathers on Wednesday evening to go out and get dinner, and then comes back for a Bible study.

This week, I started out the Bible study with some interesting findings from the doctor last week, and illustrating the conclusions that one must therefore draw as a result.

Here are the slides from my presentation. Perhaps you will reach the same conclusion as me.

This is a T Rex.

A T Rex is noted for having a very large head, yet tiny little arms.

This is a picture of something that is growing in Adrien's right now.

As you can see, this being also has quite a large head, yet tiny little arms.

The logical conclusion, therefore, is that Adrien is pregnant with a T Rex.
Given that understanding, here is are a few artistic conceptions of how such a T Rex might one day soon appear given a full gestation period.

The end.

The aforementioned video from the previous post.

The Future Soon...

A few weeks ago, our church had a talent show (an annual part of our culture, which is really cool). I had been told several times since I've been here that all of the pastor's participate. So I prepared something. I found out on the night, that I was the only pastor doing anything. I'm a sucker.

I sang a song called "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton. It's really a funny song, essentially telling the inner thoughts of someone who is perhaps in 5th grade, having been rejected by a girl, and how he sees the future playing out. It's a really silly song that is funny and sweet.

I sang the song not in Jonathan Coulton's style, but in The Adventurers Club style (an amazing place in Walt Disney World that sadly is no longer there) which is far dorkier and sweeter. Whenever I get the chance, I'll post video of it. It was quite fun.

All of that is a long way to go to get to the notion of the song that intrigues me. The notion comes from the chorus, and got me going on a line of thought that was far more theologically probing than the song itself even begins to be. It is just a silly song. The chorus of the song goes like this:

It's gonna be the future soon.
I won't always be this way,
when the things that make me week and strange
get engineered away.
It's gonna be the future soon.
I can see it all so clear.
When my heart is breaking
I just close my eyes and it's already here.

I really like that phrase, "it's gonna be the future soon." It's so optimistic. It gets to this sense of looking beyond where we are and trying to strive for the "not yet." In that way, it's very similar to how Christians should look at the world. This notion that the thing that we are living for is not here yet, but it's coming. Not maybe, but definitely. If it's not hear yet, that doesn't mean that it's not coming, that just means that it's not "the future" yet.

God doesn't promise the world to be perfect life in the here and now. In fact, quite the oppisite. All too often though, I think that Christianity is sold as such. Prosperity gospel. Get saved and start rolling in the blessings. That's not how it works. But that doesn't change the promise. Yes, there are immediate blessings, but you still have to deal with crap and suffer, because we don't live in a perfect world, we live in a broken world, and we are still subject to the effects of that brokenness. But we don't follow Christ to get a reward. We follow Christ because Christ offers salvation - Christ offers a future. Without that future, all you have is this, and this isn't really all that great. It's broken. The future is fixed. The future is perfect.

In 1st Corinthians 13, Paul puts it this way:

8But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. ¹¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. ¹²Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

The promise is that it's going to be the future soon, and things are all going to work out then. If everything isn't working out yet, than it's not the future yet.

...when my heart is breaking, I just close my eyes and it's already here.

Inspired by...

When my sister Tobyn and I were younger, we made a lot of videos that were rather pointless. At the time, we thought they were hilarious and ground breaking. They weren't really either. When I watch them now, I see that they now are hilarious again, yet for different reasons.

There is a weird kind of humor that kids age 5-10 have that is really intriguing. They are beginning to understand the elements of humor, but aren't quite adept yet at implementing it. Often times that results in jokes that make no sense or things being "funny" to them that aren't actually funny at all. Other times, though. It results in genius.

I would put this video in the latter category:


For my Facebook friends, this is the video that I'm talking about.

click here (Hulu) if the video didn't show up.

Two Blogs in One.

Two things:

1.
I have renamed the blog "blue percent." I like that better than the overly wordy previous title, so it's a bit easier to refer to. The name comes from my feelings about one of our American colloquialisms that annoys me to no end: "110%"

The notion of giving 110% of your effort to something is a notion that some coach somewhere came up with to emphasize that their players need to give all that they have, and even more than they think they have. I'm sure that coach thought he/she was clever. The real problem (where it becomes annoying to me) is that the notion of 110% has now become the new benchmark for how much effort is expected from coaches. For someone to be giving 100% effort is not good enough. I have even heard coaches sometimes one upping the 110% and going with 115% or even 120%. That's a lot of effort.

The problem with this whole thing is that it is 100% irrational (or 110% irrational). By definition, 100% of anything is the most one can give of something. if we are going to start requiring more than that scale, suddenly our the parameters that we are using to judge by make no more sense. Why not give 100,000,000% or even (wait for it)... blue %. The second we step outside of the mathematical limitations set by measuring something by percentage, we have eliminated all logical understanding of what is being asked of us, and by that standard, blue percent makes as much sense as 110 percent.

end diatribe.

2.
I was cleaning out the cat litter today (irrelevant to the point I'm about to make), and I started thinking about how much the younger generation is taught to view everything as have a subjective bias, and that there are little more vestiges for objectivity. I think the internet has a lot to do with this.

I came to this conclusion when I was thinking of reading up more on the creationism/evolution debate. I have pretty comfortable conclusions on this (I don't think that the two need to be in competition, and that ultimately they are fairly symbiotic - God uses evolution as a means of creating things), but I was wanting to learn more about the arguments for both angles.

I first thought of getting some books on the subject, but then thought that I'm sure that the internet has some valid resources. The problem with the internet is that it is hard to discern whether a source is "valid" or not, meaning that internet sources often have dubious sources, or no sources at all. The material found therein is basically subjective to that particular person's point of view. It is all too easy to put material online (case in point - this blog).

Books always felt like they had to go through a more rigorous process to get published, that the "facts" in a book had to go through more people's scrutiny before they were printed. Now, I'm not naive enough to believe everything that I read in books, as I know that there are plenty of completely false things and shady facts printed in books. by and large, though, they felt more trustworthy.

As we as a society are becoming concurrently more paperless and more skeptical, and emphatically encouraged to be both, I wonder if we will ever be able to recapture that sense of validity and concreteness in the things that we learn.

Our inherent need to learn more and understand the things around us is being corroded by a doubt that has now been cast over any piece of information that we have been given. Perhaps nowhere is this more prevalent than in political media, where two people can argue diametrically opposing points, citing "hard facts" that are immediately dismissed without regard by the other side. No evidence is needed to dismiss said facts, we can just assume that there is a bias, and that's good enough for dismissal.

The whole thing is eroding our ability to communicate, to have any common ground, and ultimately, our ability to actually learn anything concretely. When everything is an abstract, how can you build any sort of foundation?

The X-Files perhaps summed the duality of this human nature struggling against our cultural conditioning in two of it's most notable catch phrases:

"I want to believe."
"Trust no one."

Mr. Moon Swam.

I think that Kate Micucci is one of my new favorite singers.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOUEjiE6-Hk



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZXANhfSn9A