a new thing

the station me

i love running and i love running races. the race atmosphere is always a lot of fun and very encouraging. part of the reason that pam started running was because she so enjoyed the atmosphere of the road races that i was running in and she wanted to be a part of it.

i love biking. this love has developed since moving to the point area. we have such wonderful weather and trails for biking. biking is a part of the spring and summer culture around here and i have been sucked into it.

since i love running, biking, and races i thought it might be a good idea to try a duathlon and thereby combine these items. i did my first today. it was the portage country united way “run, bike, unite” duathlon. i thought it would be a simple way of testing this combination of two activities i love. all i can say is that the combination of running and biking kicked my butt worse than either of those activities ever has ever done by themselves. since i had never done a duathlon before i didn’t really know what to expect. i was pretty pleased with my time of 1:26:35 for a 2 mile run/ 13 mile bike ride/ 2 mile run. i biked a little faster than i had thought i would.

i think i’ll end up doing this again.

gives me chills

before after

i haven’t posted anything yet concerning tapestry’s trip to work with the baltodanos in diriamba, nicaragua. as usual there are many positive things i could write about. the baltodanos are truly working with GOD to do some incredible things. it is an honor to get to be a part of what GOD is doing there.

while there were many amazing things from the week that i would love to talk about the above two photos represent one the most amazing things every. many of you guys know about tapestry being able to hook the people of kilumbo up with water in 2008. the photo on the left was from the water they were drinking before they were connected with clean water. while listening to some of the parents of kilumbo talk about their dreams for their kids pam learned that one of the dreams they had was for clean water that would not cause diarrhea. kids were getting sick all the time from the filthy water.kids were getting sick all the time from the filthy water. this was a problem we could quickly help with.

now that they have clean water they kids have found a new use for the old dirty make-shift cistern. the kids in the neighborhood of kilumbo have converted the cistern into a swimming hole. the photo on the right is one of the kids showing off for us by jumping from a tree into the water. it was an amazing moment to see these kids turn something that had been a symptom of their poverty into a joyous celebration of overcoming the filthy water they had previously had. it still gives me chills to think about it.

please pray for the metallos

hey threads (a.k.a those who make up the community of tapestry) one of our own is hurting right now. pete metallo’s mom just passed away. she was sick, more and more things started happening to here, and she finally reached a point where her body just couldn’t manage them anymore. my family and i were driving through south-central alabama when i received the call from pete. i tried to let everyone know that i could reach and several people said they were going to email around to people – so you may have received several calls or email concerning this.

scripture teaches that when one part of the body hurts the whole body of CHRIST should hurt (1 corinthians 12:26). our brothers and sister are hurting now. please love on them.

sunday the 15th & 22nd

for reasons of being in nicaragua and florida i will not be preaching on at tapestry sunday the 15th or 22nd.i’ll miss you guys. the good news is that we have one of our own preaching on the 15th and a friend of many threads preaching on the 22nd. here’s who will be preaching:

  • our own john metallo will be preaching on sunday the 15th. john is a biblical studies major at maranatha bible college and senses that GOD might be calling him into some form of ministry as a pastor.
  • our friend trey turner will be preaching on sunday the 22nd. trey is founder of a network that helps CHRISTians and churches to start simple churches/house churches. many threads know and love the turners. 

i have a request for these two weeks but let me explain first. most churches have a tendency to drop in attendance when the lead pastor isn’t there for a given sunday. most people seem to think that they aren’t really sure what is going to happen so they figure it is a good sunday to miss. of course we try not to do things like most other churches.

so here’s my request. PLEASE MAKE IT A PRIORITY TO JOIN EVERYONE ON THOSE SUNDAY EVENINGS. at the very least do everything you can to be at washington elementary school on the 15th. a good number of us threads will be in nicaragua on the 15th. it is easier to talk with a group that is excited about being there and full of energy. instead of john preaching with a crowd that is low and missing a few people let’s show our youngin’ how much we support him by making this the highest attendance of the summer. it will be real cool to do the same for trey but he’s like me and has been around for awhile so it’s not as imperative.

because of the nature of how we do faith in CHRIST at tapestry you have never heard me say “it’s really important for you to be a church this sunday.” showing up on these two sundays is a different story because showing up shows love and solidarity for john and trey. this is about loving others and therefore loving GOD, thus i am saying “IT’s REALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE IN CHURCH ON THESE TWO SUNDAYS.” please blow john and trey away.

you can skip when i am there. 😉

notice a change?

if you ever use microsoft expression web to update a website that also has a wordpress blog on it you should be aware of it asking you if you want it to delete any files that are not a part of the expression website. i tell you this because i was asked such a question while updating the tapestry website. i told it sure it could delete those extra files and then discovered that the extra files were my wordpress blog.

that’s why the look of the blog has changed. i accidentally deleted all the wordpress blog files. thankfully the blog database was not deleted so i didn’t lose any of my posts. i did however lose all my formatting.

our society prefers simulations of simulations

20100804_anntaylor_560x459

the above photo is a comparison of an original photo and a retouched photo from from the ann taylor website. a former student (thanks lanee) posted an article on her facebook profile from new york magazine concerning above image and a website glitch that accidentally displayed the unretouched photo on the ann taylor item page. ann taylor has received a huge amount of flack over the extreme manipulation of the photo and the model’s physical proportions.

one of the books that has challenged me a great bit is jean baudrillard’ssimulacra and simulation” – though i found it a difficult read. in this work baudrillard challenges symbols, reality, and society. baudrillard discusses a progression from seeing truth in reality, to simulating reality, to dismissing reality and seeing truth only in it’s simulation. if you can’t tell this book was one of the main sources for the movie “the matrix” (the first one – not the two other let down sequels). part of what challenged me from baudrillard was his argument that often in an attempt to further the experience of a natural good or beauty we develop a simulation of that natural item and then often slowly move to the point that we consider to the fake experience more real that natural one. here are a couple of examples. 1) real food doesn’t look “real” enough in photos so photographers often use fake food to photograph and then people wonder why their food doesn’t look like the photos. 2) ever meet someone who thinks of herself as a rock climber but has never actually climbed in nature – instead she climbs walls with brightly colored plastic “nubs” screwed into it (something originated for practice) and never goes out into nature.

we live in a fake society that actually believes the fake/plastic items are more true than the real items.

so back to the above photo.

according to bobbi brown (a cosmetic artist) supermodels are freaks of nature. yet many believe them to be perfect examples of beauty. of course, few consider that they might actually be real good examples of an unhealthy body (way too low of bmi’s). supermodels shape themselves to convey feminity. in doing that they actually become less female – such low bmi’s lead to a cessation of fertility. the above untouched woman is probably such an example. she is quite skinny in the untouched photo. the untouched photo is almost assuredly already fake. the models has probably been “padded”, taped, and made up to make her look more “perfect.” yet this fake image of a woman is not fake enough to represent the reality beauty that is wanted. the already unnaturally thin woman is not considered thin enough and the company decided to photoshop her image down to unreal proportions. it is literally impossible for anyone to look like the retouched photo, but that is the image that ann taylor is selling.

we could blame this all on the company (and the should be ashamed of themselves) but the reality probably is that we have willingly given up truth for simulations. we have exchange the “realness” for what is fake and we now believe that the fake is reality. what is fake around me that i am choosing over reality? what simulations are you choosing over reality?

it would be great if we would all “take the red pill” a little more often.