Month: February 2006

i love the rolling stones music (especially the original stuff) but it’s not very entertaining to me to watch a 62 year old man swagger around on stage like he is still young and rebellious. i wish they were just a studio band now or doing stuff like clapton does now.

for anyone interested dr. cornel west will be in baton rouge thursday, february 9th @ 6:00 p.m. speaking at the baton rouge community college. i don’t agree with much of what he sayd but it’s still interesting enough to me that i’m going to go.

now for the good church news – today i saw the light at the end of the tunnel. as i have posted before my church has gone through some rough times recently. it has not been fun. today we had dr. stan norman preach to possibly be our interim pastor. for those who do not understand the baptist manner of finding a pastor i’ll explain. baptist to not have a higher organization to assign or help find a pastor. every baptist church is completely autonomous. so when a baptist church needs to find a pastor it has to do it on its own. this usually takes awhile and therefore most baptist churches find an interim pastor to fill the pulpit until they can find their real pastor. the interim helps give a consistent voice to the pulpit. consistency is key. “preaching by committee” never seems to work – no matter how good your “committee” is. so getting an interim pastor is a big step to our church recovering it’s zest. dr. norman is a systematic theology prof at new oreleans baptist theological seminary. he knows his stuff. i thought he did a very good job today. his preaching style is definitely more modern in its nature and while i would prefer a more post-modern style you still aren’t going to hear me complain. it was the best sermon we’ve had from the pulpit in awhile. the church still has a long way to go but at least a faint light has begun to appear.

i found “splinter cell – pandora tomorrow” today for $14 and decided to buy it for me and the kids. thus far it involves a ton of sneaking around. i personally tend to go for a game with lots of gun play. i fear that i may be disappointed here. sneaking around is just not my thing. i hope not.

the photo above is composed of a few of my favorite playdough sculptures from our worship service last night. i asked the kids and adults to stay seated and work on sculptures while we all sang together. the tables were full of playdough and i wanted them to make a sculpture of how they felt when they knew beyond a shadow of doubt that they had sinned. the sculpture didn’t have to be anything that anyone else would understand. it merely needed to have meaning for them. we used these sculptures later in the evening as a means of representing the forgiveness that we receive from CHRIST through the love HE showed on the cross. the kids left these sculptures behind them at the end of the evening. though we never discussed specific meanings of each one (after all they were supposed to leave it behind them) some of them spoke volumes to me.

awhile back i read where improv everywhere did an improv completely from mp3’s that interested people downloaded. the people who downloaded the improv mp3 came to a local venue and then were taken through the improv experience via the mp3 they had dowloaded. here’s their description of it. i thought it sounded great and then began to think that it might be an interesting worship experience. it be a cool way of discovering being individually and coporately involved within faith at the same time (i.e. you are individually listening to the mp3 but listening to it at the same time as others and thus doing the same things). i don’t work well on vague timelines so i finally decided that i would just go ahead and schedule it. so it’s setup for the wednesday, march 1st. this means i have to write everything out and get the whole thing mapped out word for word and then recorded. i just wish i knew someone with a cool british accent to record it.

do any ideas of what i can do within the mp3 to convey individuals working within community?

pam and i are part of the less than one percent of the world that owns two vehicles. pam’s ’98 mazada 626 (with 140,000 miles) resides at night inside our garage while my ’98 ford explorer (with 118,000 miles) sits in our driveway most nights. i say “most nights” because when either of my boys want to play basketball i have to move the truck to the side of the street. yesterday was such a day.

i pulled the truck in front of my house and let the boys play a little bball. i left “fred”, my truck, on the side of the street over night. when i woke up this morning and went out to the truck i discovered that i had apprently left the doors unlocked during the evening. the way i know this is because someone had gone through my glovebox and console storage and thrown everything out. i’m assuming this was in an attempt to find some money or something of value. of course, the theif that broke into my car was an idiot and therefore nothing was missing. i can safely safe that he/she was an idiot because i had left my $1,000 guitar in the back of the truck and it was still there this morning. he/she didn’t even steal noah’s fossil watch in the change consol which would have at least netted the perp a few bucks. all the idiot was able to do was throw a few papers around the truck. this is one of the reasons why they say “crime doesn’t pay” because most of the people breaking into vehicles and homes are too stupid to make anything from it.