Some days you’re born to win; some days you hope to place; some days you just want to get out alive. There’s no shame in that—it’s just the way life goes.
Category Archives: Personal
Even defeat has its silver linings
I’m on vacation right now, because my father and brother are out; and they came out for a couple things, one of which was to go down with me to see our Seahawks play at Indianapolis. Given the relative strength of the two teams at this point this season, the outcome was predictable, and it followed the prediction: we got crushed. The score was 34-17 Colts, and the game was nowhere near that close; it could have been 42-3 if Indianapolis had had some reason to want it to be. They didn’t, because they’re a classy franchise. Similarly, their fans proved what I’ve been telling people my whole time here, that this state has good people; out of the thousands of Colts fans we saw, we only ran into two jerks, while there were a number who wandered over to have friendly conversations with us about our team, and theirs, and the league in general, and the city, and whatever else came up. (And to the one jerk who tried to heckle us and asked why we came to “his” stadium when our team “sucks”: I’ll tell you again, we came to see our team play. Why was that so hard for you to understand? Would you only want to see your team if they were good? If so, that says something pretty sad about your supposed fandom.)
Anyway, yesterday was a very long day. Aside from the result of the game, though, it was a good day to spend with family and meet some of my brother’s good friends—good people all around. Now today I get to catch up on the things I wasn’t doing yesterday when I wasn’t home.
Shameless plug o’ the week
Well, things did in fact slow down after Thursday, but not so’s you’d know it by here, since I haven’t really had the time to write the last couple days. I have, however, been able to bring one of the projects I’ve been working on has come to fruition. Our congregation voted last month to change its name, a vote which was confirmed by our presbytery a week ago yesterday; and as part of all the advertising we’re launching to publicize and build off the name change, our Session voted to lay out the funds to build a new website. I’m proud of them for seeing past the cost to the value of that step.
It’s now up; it isn’t completely done (we still need some more pictures up, and another page or two), but it’s pretty close, and I think it looks really good. Most of that isn’t to my credit (I didn’t design it; we purchased the website and the hosting from a company called Clover, with which I’m quite pleased), and my part of the work will no doubt come in for a fair bit of improvement over the next couple months, but for a start, I’m still quite happy with it. In particular, I’m happy that this website includes an integrated calendar, which will be helpful for us, and that it includes a built-in audio player for uploading sermons.
Which means—and I feel rather silly, but this does make me grin—that I now have sermon audio up. Not much as yet, just the first three sermons of my current series on James (I don’t even have this morning’s up at the moment), but the rest will be coming as I can get it uploaded. The quality, alas, isn’t as good as I could wish, since the congregation is still catching up on the technology, but it’s workable. Which is progress, and I’m pleased.
Just a quick note
to prove I’m still alive . . . this week has been absolutely crazy; I’ve been head-down in church stuff, and what energy I’ve had left over from that has gone to family. I think after today, things should slow down a bit, though. I feel like the prairie dog crouching in the hole, wondering if it’s safe to stick his head up.
On a random note, one of the businesses I pass on my way to work is a storage company, one of the local places to rent storage lockers. Out front this last week or so they’ve had one of those rented message boards with the built-in arrows; the arrow has been pointing to one of their buildings, and the message reads, “FUTURE HOME OF HIDDEN TREASURES.” Maybe it’s just me, but if I had a storage locker there, I’d be a little worried . . .
Carry on
It’s way too early in the morning to be up, especially after a long and draining weekend; but up I am, watching Kansas videos on YouTube and working my way towards doing something productive with the time. For the moment, though, I’m just happy to have found these:
Carry On Wayward Son
Point of Know Return
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=60A1yKc2hi4
Morning prayer
Take, O take me as I am; summon out what I shall be;
set your seal upon my heart and live in me.
—John Bell
This is a simple little musical prayer written by the Iona Community’s John Bell, with a reflective melody that ends on an unresolved chord (the melody ends on re); I’ve seen it used most often as a congregational response, either to Scripture readings or during a time of prayer. For whatever reason, it floated into my mind this past hour, and has been flowing through it ever since. I guess this is the prayer of my heart this morning, for myself and for our congregation.
This is what happens with a mind set on “shuffle”
My dear wife, knowing that I was stopping by the store on the way home from work to pick up some more distilled water for the church, asked me to pick up a few things for her as well—including ice cream for the brownies she was making for dessert (courtesy of a good friend down the street). My brain started spinning this out to a familiar tune, and before long had produced this:
Brownies and ice cream and water in kettles,
Jewel-eyed reptiles made of precious metals,
Clockwork automatons trying their wings:
These are a few of my favorite things.
I suppose it says something about the contents of my brain that it moved so quickly from my shopping list to a sort of steampunk-fantasy thing; I have to admit I find the juxtaposition of that with Rodgers and Hammerstein amusing, but your mileage may vary. I may keep playing around with this for my own amusement; if anyone wants to try a verse, feel free to post it in the comments.
Note on the past week
If anyone wondered about the radio silence around here the last several days, you may be assured that I haven’t run out of things to say (not that anyone who knows me would consider that likely); rather, we were on vacation in Pennsylvania and found ourselves unexpectedly without Internet access for most of the week. I had the chance to spend time with dear friends, see Gettysburg for the first time, and go to the wedding of one good friend from college—and even, unexpectedly, to participate: the minister, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, invited all pastors present to come up and lay hands on the couple for the prayer of blessing. It was a wonderful moment in perhaps the best wedding I’ve ever seen. (I can’t speak for my own, though I love the pastors who married us dearly—I was too busy getting married to absorb much of what was going on.) Leaving my own wedding aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more joyful bride, or felt happier for a wedding couple.
I have to say, too, if there’s a template for what a truly gospel-driven wedding ceremony looks like, that had to be it, or pretty close. If you happen to be looking for a gospel-driven church in Pittsburgh, I can recommend Bellefield Presbyterian without question or hesitation; just from the wedding ceremony, I can say with complete assurance that the pastor there, the Rev. Dr. R. Geoffrey Brown, is a man of God who glories, delights, exults, revels in the gospel of Jesus Christ and proclaims it with deep joy and humility. He and his wife are also wonderful people—of that much I have no doubt, even from my brief contact with them. It was a true joy and blessing to be a part of that worshipping community this past Saturday.
Good books help rough days
Down with a gut bug today; have I mentioned I have a wonderful wife? She swung by the library while she was out and about at one point and brought back a whole pile of books, including the first three of Jim Butcher‘s Harry Dresden novels, which a good friend of ours had strongly recommended a while back; I finished the first one, Storm Front, today, and am about 2/3 of the way through the second one, Fool Moon, and have enjoyed both a great deal. For those not familiar with the series, think classic hardboiled detective fiction in contemporary Chicago but with the addition of magic and magical creatures such as vampires and werewolves; the protagonist, Harry Dresden, is a wizard and a detective.
The books tend toward the bleaker side of fantasy (not surprising, since the big blurb on Storm Front comes from the redoubtably dark Glen Cook), but not without hope, and Butcher does some things very well as a writer. I wouldn’t call him a great stylist, but he has a core of interesting characters, writes some very nice scenes, and so far at least, is telling good stories of their kind; the books feel real. Not much is original, but he’s given the standards his own twist, which counts for a fair bit. For urban fantasy, it’s not a match for Neverwhere, but it’s an enjoyable read, and it has this advantage: there’s a lot more of it. It’s certainly brightened my day.
1000
This is my 1000th post. I haven’t noted previous milestones, but 1000 is just such a resonant round number, I couldn’t let it pass unremarked. Considering that from October 2003 through December 2006 I only posted 30 times, no one would have been likely to predict I’d hit this one (not that anyone would have cared enough to consider the question); 2007 was a busier year, but even then I only put up 65 posts. In January of last year, though, I was inspired to take blogging seriously as a discipline, and that changed things; in the 16 months from my first post that year until now, I’ve put up 905 pieces, or about 56 per month. Of course, a lot of those have been minor—video posts, song lyrics, quotes—but there’s been a fair bit of serious material, too; this blog is still small potatoes as these things go (actually, fingerlings would be more to the point), but there are folks who read on some kind of regular basis, too, and I appreciate all of you.
I was ruminating a bit the other day over some of the hits and misses I’ve had, and my mind got stuck a little on my 2006 post on Barack Obama, in which I praised his speech on religion in the public square. That was the point at which he really stuck in my mind as a likely presidential candidate, though I didn’t think he’d be ready for the office in 2008 (and 100 days into his administration, I still don’t). In retrospect, I think I gave him more credit for that speech than he had coming, but if I heard more what I wanted to hear than what he was actually committed to, I don’t blame myself too much for that, since he has a gift for eliciting that sort of response. Given how many pro-life evangelicals managed to convince themselves that he deserved their support, I think I did a pretty decent job of staying objective; I suspect the biggest fallout for the pro-life cause from the Obama presidency will be the number of evangelicals who, when they really face the cognitive dissonance between their convictions and their vote, sacrifice the former to justify the latter to themselves and others, and end up coming out in support of abortion. I hope there won’t be too many, but I don’t think they’ll be isolated cases, either.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the ride, and whether it does anyone else any good or not, I think this blog is helping me grow as a thinker and writer, and I even think it’s helped my preaching; and I do hope it provides some benefit to those of you who are regular visitors, and to the various folks who drop by for one thing and another. Onward and upward.