Bob Sportel is a new hero of mine. In his 20s he bought a truck off a farmer for $75 (even tried to talk the farmer down to $50) and has been driving it daily for the past 38 years. To quote Sportel:
“It kept going so I just kept driving it,”
That’s my type of man. You can read the whole article here.
I don’t suspect I have 38 years of existence left in my body so I doubt I could say that this is a life goal for me, but I can say that I am VERY impressed with the guy. I seriously don’t understand you people who constantly get different (especially new) vehicles.
Noah and I are presently at my mom’s place watching the NFC Championship Game (Geaux Saints) and as usual Clive has joined us for the trip. He just discovered the cat bed and is working pretty hard to fit into it. It has been quite entertaining.
Here’s the other thing I’ve learned, which is something everyone used to know, something I knew even while manning the hamburger grill: food is love. To cook for yourself, rather than merely feed yourself, is to show yourself love, especially important when there us a sudden and marked lack of others willing to do that. To cook for others is not only a form of caring, it’s a form of connection. The transformation of raw ingredients into cuisine is often called alchemy, but the true alchemy is what happens to you, the people you cook for, and the relationship between all of you.
Peter Sagal, The Incomplete Book of Running, p. 93-4.
This is so right. Today I spent the morning cooking jambalaya for one of the companies for which I chaplain. I love these ladies and gents and I am thankful for the privilege of being their chaplain. Cooking for them this morning was a way of displaying that love. This past Saturday was the Haycreek Christmas party and Pam and I attended for the 3rd year. At the party they gave me a shirt that says “I’m Just Here For the Jambalaya” because I typically make jambalaya for them a once or twice a year. Naturally, I wore the shirt today when I cooked for them.
This is why I encourage Tapestry to regularly cook for each other and others. We have two opportunities coming up soon. Thursday, January 31st we are doing the meal for the Place of Peace meal and Sunday, February 3rd we will watch the Super Bowl and potluck it together. I hope you take advantage of these opportunities to share the love.
I know I often say this in church but setup and tear down are my favorite part of Tapestry’s worship gatherings. I really believe everyone should come be a part of setup. Seriously if you are interested I get there each Sunday at 8:30 a.m. and you are more than welcome to join us. Your help would be nice and appreciated but your presence will be the real gift. If you aren’t a part of Tapestry you should help with setup at your church, I would bet it probably has the same fun vibe. The best things seem to happen during setup.
For example, Conor H has developed a habit of dabbing. We aren’t really a dabbing church. We aren’t cool . So Conor dabbing is funny. Still Conor dabbing wouldn’t really be that great except that one Sunday Eric decided to dab also. Eric may be the only person on earth that looks more ridiculous dabbing than I would. Eric blocked Conor and me in and then dabbed as a celebration. I laughed so hard that I cried.
So when I saw the sticker of Jesus dabbing I knew I had to get it and sneak it onto Eric’s car (with Natalie’s permission of course because I’m not a vandal). It only took me two weeks to get the opportunity (the bozo kept driving the wrong car). Sunday I was able to get it on there. The bummer of the situation is that he found the sticker after 36 hours. After he didn’t initially notice it when he had to walk right past the rear of his car, I was hoping for a week or two. The great thing is that when he saw the sticker he initially thought he was looking at someone else’s car.
Which brings me to a quote from the book I just finished. I finished reading Margaret Atwood’s “Cat’s Eye” recently. I am not sure how I feel about it yet. At first I thought it was rather boring because it was about mundane life but now I kind of find it stuck in my head. I think I may eventually read it again, which for me is the sign of a good book. The quote that has been sticking with me is from the protagonist’s brother Stephen. He describes the atom by saying it is …
“A lot of empty space,” Stephen says. “It’s hardly there at all. It’s just a few specks held in place by forces. At the subatomic level, you can’t even say that matter exists. You can only say that it has a tendency to exist.”
Here is my poor attempt at drawing this.
Even in my very far from scale drawing you can see that it is basically made up of emptiness. If we focus on the specks of matter we miss the majority of the atom. I feel like we often do that with life. We focus on the few “shinny” moments and events and long for more of them while not realizing that the majority of our lives are the mundane and we make no attempt to enjoy the mundane.
Let’s just look at my 2018. Here are the “shinny” (none ordinary) moments of my year.
I spent a week in France with my family (admittedly there were many unusual moments this week)
One child graduated from grad school
I helped my mom move up to Wisconsin
I floored our soon to be Library (formerly Living Room – but I hate that room name) – this was big to us
I watched a touring company version of Fiddler on the Roof with Pam and my mom.
I’m sure there are other non ordinary moments that happened during my 2018 but most of the time was spent in ordinary moments.
eating at Taco Januitas with Noah,
walking around Adam’s new home town and having him describe what he likes about it,
debriefing my day with Pam,
eating the Thursday night meal with my mom,
driving Clive around town,
walking around our block and talking with our neighbors,
reading at the end of the day before I go to sleep,
waking up inn the middle of the night because one of the stupid cats flick their tail onto my face and realizing how wonderfully cold the house is (we let the temp drop to 62 at night) and how warm our blankets are,
grabbing coffee with various people throughout the week and hearing about their life,
setting up church each week and making fun of and being made fun of by my friends there,
fishing, hunting, and walking/running/riding through the woods,
randomly seeing bald eagles fly around our community
etc., etc.
These are the nothing moments and they make up most of my day. They are glorious. Recently I talked someone who told me how sad she was because her past few weekends had been boring, she had done nothing. We started detailing out what she had done over the past year. It was pretty significant with quite a few “shinny” moments, but she thought it was nothing before we wrote it out. She felt like everyone else had so many significant moments until she saw her’s on paper. She judged what she knew about her days by what she didn’t know about other people’s days. I described my list of moments from 2018 and we estimated that this very generously equaled 12 days of big moments. 12 out of 365, and she agreed I had lived a pretty excited year (after all, I could say “well during my trip to France this year …).
Most of our days are made of the nothing moments. We need to enjoy them because they make up most of the shape of our lives. If we regret them then we regret the majority of our days. Right now I am enjoying the sounds of good music at Zest Bakery and Coffee (they consistently put on good music) and the wonderful taste of their coffee and a peanut butter cream bar, while I hear the muted conversations of friends. Life is wonderful.
One of the things that I love about Corporate Chaplains of America, the company through which I chaplain, is that they know that there is a lot of burnout among chaplains and therefore they give/force us to take a good amount of vacation. I have 4 work weeks worth of vacation, which is amazingly generous. I have to take off one week each quarter, otherwise I get a bit of a talking to.
This past week was the last chance I had to take my last week of vacation for 2018. So I stayed home and got some work done. In fact, I’m not evening preaching tomorrow (Conor H is and you should come to Tapestry and hear/support him) so I didn’t even have to work on a message this week). Here’s what I accomplished this week.
Bookcases
In our attempt to continue shaping our home into what we want it to be we are adding built in bookcases to our Library (I am trying to stop calling it the Living Room because I hate the term – it derives from our fear of death, our Living Rooms used to be called Parlors until the funeral industry developed and began referring to their rooms as funeral parlors, because the home parlor was where the body was displayed, and so we picked a name that was the exact opposite of the name for the room where we displayed our dead loved ones. ARGH. Fear of death dominates so much of what is done, so we won’t have a Living Room, but a Library). We’ve had quite a few books in storage that we want to put out and it is our firm belief that you can never have too many books in a room. Therefore, we are building bookcases from floor to ceiling. This is phase one. Once they are painted and books are displayed we will consider phase 2, which will involve building cases up to the ceiling that incline with it. That’s a project for later.
Guitars
A while back Adam was going to sell the first guitar that was actually his, an Epiphone Les Paul Special II, and I decided why not buy it from him and upgrade it. An Epiphone Les Paul Special II is not a great guitar. They are cheap models meant for people who want something decent enough to learn on, but don’t want to spend a ton of money on a guitar yet. Sill often they have a good neck and body, which this one did, therefore, with a little work they can often become very decent little guitars. I basically followed this blog post and did the same basic thing to mine.
It sounds pretty good now. I knew this had worked out pretty well when the luthier who put the tuners in said “This thing plays like butter. You’ve got yourself a pretty good little guitar there now.”
Since I did all this to Adam’s old guitar, and I realized that I enjoyed it, I decided to do the same things to my old Squier Stratocaster. Again this isn’t an expensive guitar but with the right setup it can sound pretty decent. I already had non-stock pickups in it (Dimarzio Virtual Vintage pickups) but I never changed the wiring, switch, and pots in it. So this time I shielded the body cavities with copper tape, put in new premium wiring, 5-way switch, and pots, replaced the pickgaurd with something slightly more fun, and replaced the string saddles. I like the D’Addario auto-trim tuners so much that I am going to put them on the Squier too eventually. That will probably be next month.
BTW I liked the look of one bold sticker on the LP Special and now need o decide if I want to put one bold sticker on the Strat too. If you have a suggestion for a good looking, and possibly fun, sticker for the Strat I would love to hear it.
All it all it was a pretty successful week off. I love time off.
