Monthly Archives: December 2005

Oysters

This last weekend I had my first exposure to Oysters. And while some of you may think that’s a reference to my first experience with Jews who use a lot of Yiddish… you’re wrong. I had a soup that had oysters in it. That soup was tasty, slightly spicy (it was technically a gumbo, but it wasn’t as thick as I’d expected), and had oysters, shrimp and Andoullie sausage in it. The worst part of the oyster is the sense that of knowing its cooked, but it feels soft and slimey like the thing just came out of the shell. However, it wasn’t bad, I didn’t die, the restaurant didn’t blow up and I didn’t start seeing ferries and flying hippopotomi.

Also, see Madagascar even if you don’t normally watch children’s cartoons. There’s some really good stuff in there (rent the DVD).

Evie: Video Footage

You can download a huge 16MB video file of Evie smiling and Jessica and I making complete fools of ourselves keeping her smiling here. I figured that since I still have yet to post some new pictures this was the way to go. It should be rather high quality (for the internet) and you should be able to view it quite large 🙂

The audio is a bit funky because our camcorder appears to be messed up for no apparent reason. It keeps me humble and from outdoing Steven Spieldberg.

UPDATE Some people have reported that the mpeg file did not work. Here it is in AVI, and here it is in a Quicktime MOV file.

Hockey Boots

Abby has Hockey boots. Not really, but she has boots that she calls hockey boots. Why? I blame Julia Roberts. She was in that one movie with some guy who had problems with gerbils… Richard something or other. She played a prostitute who had a thing for very tall boots. So… in my family tall boots (unfortunately) were called ‘hooker boots.’ So, Abby, not having a clue what hooker boots are has hockey boots. And let me tell you: she can play all of the hockey in boots she wants, as soon as she takes up fishing, its over.

Burned Out By Christianity

Christians often get burned out or burned or hurt at churches. I myself have left three churches in my lifetime (one as a child of my parents, though not any less painful than the two I left as an adult). There are three paths that a burned, burned out or hurt Christian can choose to take:

  1. Give up
  2. Try again
  3. Learn & Grow

I think it is important to note that I have met people whom I believe have taken these paths or have taken them myself. I have actually, at one stage or another done all three, but when I say ‘give up I’m referring to a ‘final call’ type of give up, not just a ‘give up for a while’ type. Let me clarify the scenarios so as to not leave any confusion.

Give Up
The Give Up is when someone has gone to one or more churches, seen that others are unable to live what they’re being taught (or bring into the church – this can be dangerous, frankly), get burned out or hurt and then give up on Church all together. Often this is accompanied with a proclamation that Christianity is a farse or that a person can’t ‘do’ Christianity. However, that last statement is a generalization and should not be applied to all ‘give up’ people. In short instead of continuing on in pursuit of a better or healthy church or digging deeper into God’s word to find out what it says a better or healthy church is the person quits while they’re ahead because they can only see failure in the churches in their town, county, state, country and world. Granted there is a limitation to the number of miles you can walk, drive or fly to go to church and participate in the body of Christ. When we gave up going to church for a while in Texas we had driven 45 miles to try to find a church and come up short. Going to any of the churches’ meetings that far away outside of Sunday morning was nearly impossible due to traffic.

The problem often in many cases is that the burned out believer has not gone to God’s word. God’s word is not the final authority in their life and so they may have wrong expectations, not be able to discern what a strong (mature) believer looks like, or be able to see that we are not to abandon the fellowship of the believers.  God’s word teaches us about grace, which is a significant element in what we look for in the church – sanctification by its very definition means that no church has arrived!  We look for signs of health and pray for opportunities to help edify the body where the Lord opens doors.

Try Again
The Try Again person is one who says, “I’ve been burned or hurt, but there’s got to be a better church out there.” This person goes to another church hoping that it is better. This approach may lead people on a ‘steeple chase’ (reference: Steve Taylor song) where they skip from church to church hoping to find one ‘just right.’ This may also be the ‘Goldilocks’ approach where we find ones that make us too uncomfortable with either legalism or liberalism, music preferences, emotional feelings and general ‘felt needs’ problems. This approach, too, is not biblically based in many cases. The problem is that the person may not have gone to God’s word for deeper understanding of what the church is about, what a believer’s life is to be like, and what is important in a church for (growing) believers. It is possible for a person to be blessed to find a church where there is growth, but it is the exception and not the rule.

Learn & Grow
The learn and grow person gets hurt or burned and then goes to God’s word, boldly approaching the throne of God seeking God’s wisdom (James 1:5), prayerfully going to new churches after checking doctrinal statements ahead of time when possible [if your church does not have a clear and relatively broad doctrinal statement covering a wide variety of doctrines, ask those in charge for an update that clarifies your church’s positions, it may make or break the visitor’s search].  Understand that all sorts of things will come into your life for you to grow from.  You are being conformed to the image of Christ and that’s a significant place to be.  No church will be perfect, but you look for the strongest possible body and then get involved.

Conclusion
I did not understand any of these principles and I did not see their greater implication in my life.  This doesn’t just fit into looking for a church, it applies to a broad array of areas: 1) diagnose the real problem 2) figure out how you should really respond 3) learn and grow.  If you quit or repeat your folly you’ll just get frustrated.

One of My Worster Mistakes Ever

Last night, in what is possibly one of the sins in life that could be compared to say, murder, being discovered to not be wearing clean underpants when you get in an accident or not flossing daily: I went into Wal-Mart for a quick pickup of a few items Jess had put on my shopping list that were not at Whole Foods Market. Woops! I said ‘Quick’ and ‘Wal-Mart’ in the same sentence. However, this is not about sins or quick, or a quick sin for that matter (see: teaching a 3 year old potty words).

What amazed me was that a 2 liter bottle of Fresca no calory fruit soft-drink was 88 cents. A 20 ounce bottle was $1.20. If you do the math I could dump what I didn’t need down the drain and come out ahead just for buying 2 liters. I don’t think Coke is making its $100 billion on 2 liter bottles, but instead from those smaller bottles that people buy for convenience.

But enough about convenience. I think the Wal-Mart employees are working so slowly at the checkout lines because the ‘Wal-Mart Channel’ speakers are blaring Wal-Mart propaganda at them and their customers for hours on end. You can’t listen to, “We care about you and your family at Wal-Mart,” while making a $5.34 an hour as a cash register clerk and think, “Heck, yeah! Wal-Mart cares about me!” In fact if anything you can only think, “Turn this freaking thing off before somebody gets a load of damaged groceries for free!”

I especially liked that the Wal-Mart channel had a suggestion that people bring in photos and have Christmas cards made. One happy customer on the commercial said (and I’m not making this up) that people called her to tell her how professional they looked. Do you call people up and say, “Dang, Lucy, that’s the most unprofessional Christmas Card I’ve ever seen. If you send something like that out again, I’m never going to talk to you again!” I didn’t think so.

So, I learned a valuable lesson: buy cheap soda at Wal-Mart. But I learned a more valuable lesson: don’t shop at Wal-Mart period.

Lost in a World of Aliases

Jessica has been a big fan of Alias and Lost, both JJ Abrams production, for some time now. I was initially into Alias, but it eventually got too formulaic. Then Lost came out and I’ve been more hooked on that show lately. However, almost everytime Jessica watches Alias I call it Lost for no apparent reason. It is as if Alias does nto exist and my mind can only spew out ‘Lost.’ I hope this doesn’t happen in other areas of my life. It would be really annoying to have word associations in my head so as to place me in a scenario where I find that I always tell people that they look ‘fat’ instead of ‘good.’ As it is I can’t hardly not say that Jessica is pregnant even though she just had Evie. And by just I mean 6 weeks ago, which is plenty of time for recovery and getting pregnant again. That would be just slightly intense.

I’d rather keep calling Alias Lost and just move on now.

Coke, $100 Billion Isn’t Good Enough

In this article: Coke to retire ‘Real’ with new tagline in 2006 you can read about how Coke is only 1.8 Billion dollars ahead of Pepsi in drink sales and its really causing them to push harder. That’s right, billions and billions of dollars are spent on sodas around the globe. Those two ‘big players’ bring in just shy of 200 billion together.

Sales have been slumping though lately. I think this could be because of diet changes, a shrinkage in the economy or the fact that sodas with corn syrup have been linked to all sorts of medical problems, as have sodas with nutra-sweet. I’m doing my part to increase soda consumption, but Coke and Pepsi do not own Dr. Pepper, so I’m not helping them by drinking the Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper.

Schnikeys that’s a huge industry.

Bredth of Knowledge Verses Depth of Knowledge

In life I have been a jack of all trades, but master of none. Or so the idiom goes, and my English isn’t spectacular so I’ll stick with that idiom. You see, I’ve been fascinated with life around me and wanted to learn about as much as possible at least just to know something about it. I have picked up bits of musical training, juggling, slight of hand tricks, bits of languages [Spanish, German, French and Greek all mean almost nothing to me, but not nothing like Russian], mathematics, philosophy, woodworking, gardening, driving a car, riding a motorcycle, fishing, coffee brewing, tea brewing, cooking, bicycling, photography and parenting 🙂 However, there are a few items that are on a much shorter list, a list of things that I want to know a lot about. I want to know about programming and computers, I want to know a lot about theology and I want to know a lot about my wife. Those subjects are very important because my depth of knowledge in those areas has a broad impact on my future.

I want to add hundreds of things to my repertoire of experiences and understandings so that I can have a breadth of knowledge that understands how various fields of learning interact. Sometimes breakthroughs in one field are a direct result of knowledge of things in another field. At other times having a knowledge of one field helps you explain another field to people who only have a good grasp of the first field (example: explaining how Apple OS X works to people who use Windows requires a third party object to explain simplicity. Windows users inherently look for more complexity in software which makes learning how a Mac works twice as difficult for experienced Windows users). I once read an essay by Albert Einstein in which he encouraged people to gain a broad knowledge of many fields so that they could be educated.

I love history. Not just dates and times, which are of some use, but stories of people who lived through things and hopefully learned things as well. I love to learn about how nations were created, wars were faught and won, and how people succeded through failure. I figure that failure is only part of learning in this human life. Sometimes death is the only way to see life [see: Christ’s Resurrection]. Sometimes we have to try the many possible solutions before we succeed [See: Thomas Edison and Team’s work on the light bulb to find the right filament]. Sometimes we get it right the first time, and those times are often sweet. They are when we feel like we’re ‘naturals’ or that we have a talent or knack for something. I have a knack for learning things and I think making people laugh. My depth of knowledge in many areas is not very deep, but enough to make me dangerous, but I do know one thing: I know what counts. Do you know your strengths and weaknesses and what matters most? No matter what I learn I’ve found that knowing those things keeps me grounded… well, that and gravity – I know a wee bit about physics.

The Most Shameful of Confessions

I don’t know how to tie very many knots. I was never a boyscout, I didn’t learn how to tie knots on my grandparent’s farm, I didn’t learn how to tie more than my shoes at any given time. I can barely put together a slipknot. However, there’s hope for me yet: I Will Knot!. Its a site with simple text based descriptions and quick videos demonstrating the knotting techniques. I think that I’ll have to get a small piece of rope from the garage and get thist stuff down. Then I can check yet one more thing off of my list of things to do before I die.

Well, at least I can trade this for another thing like riding a uni…umpgh [and the sound of crashing]!

Getting Cold

It is now really close to 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-17.78 degrees Celsius) here in Aurora. What is so strange for me is this: I’m not used to the temperature getting that cold. However, getting that cold and getting that warm are quite possible, so I won’t complain. At least its not in the heavy negatives wherein deisel fuel starts turning to a solid 🙂