We had lunch at a local chain called “Shari’s.” It was not a tasty treat, though the service was good. It was strange to have so many people happy to serve while the food was a low quality fare.
“That’s what the guy who invented underwear said.” That’s a line from Jimmy Neutron that I just overheard. Sorry, it was funny so I had to report it. It is much like the whiteboard quote of the week, only different.
On the news now they just had a ‘breaking news story.’ Wherein a boiler exploded at an apartment complex. One man was hurt with minor injuries and another refused medical attention. People are all fine and the complex is not severaly damaged. That’s breaking news if I’ve never heard it before.
We’ll be taking the Oregon Trail to Portland and then heading up to my in-laws North of Vancouver, Washington tomorrow. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to go to Mount St. Helen or maybe I can get some cement boots and swim with the fishes in the Columbia river. I’m going to be helping with some finish work around my in-laws’ house and then we’ll probably all just sleep for a few days because we can.
For those of you whom are worried about me working… I should be doing so for at least part of the time on the trip. Blogging may be lighter than normal, but probably not. I’m often inspired whilst in the mountains, hills and valleys.
I don’t know a lot about food history in the grand scheme of things, but I have one question: who decided that it would be a fantastic idea to eat ginger root? Who was digging in the dirt and said, “I’m going to stick that in my mouth. It looks just like an internal organ from a cancer infested critter. Tasty.” I enjoy the ginger root, really, but that’s not something that I would look at and say, “This looks like it should be eaten.” It’s sure no apple.
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).
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.